Almost one year later, Peekaso isn't nearly as frantic. He's still Raheem DeVaughn's art director, and he still paints live on stage when DeVaughn performs. But he doesn't run around as much, partially because the soul singer has slowed his tour schedule to work on his fourth studio album. Peekaso still paints each Tuesday at the Up and Up Open Mic. At this week's, he executed an intricate portrait of a young Michael Jackson.

Peekaso says he is exercising patience these days, slowing down the speed by which he paints, and using different brushes to accentuate his work. In years past, Peekaso applied his colors with squeeze tubes and blended them any way he could. Now, he uses more refined brushes to highlight the details of his subjects' faces. "I'm staying true to what I believe in, but it has a whole new feel to it, more raw emotion," he says. "It's new to me again."

Given his popularity here, it's hard to believe that Peekaso's show at Lamont Bishop Gallery this weekend is his first solo exhibit in the area. He says the show features 100 paintings, some of which were completed within the past month. You'll see a piece made from Roc-A-Wear clothing fabric, a portrait of Kurt Cobain, and some artwork inspired by Peekaso's young daughter. "I have a lot of supporters out there, so this gives them a chance to see me in a different light," Peekaso says.

A reception on Saturday begins at 7:30 p.m. Lamont Bishop Gallery is at 1314 9th St. NW.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Riot grrrl's in the middle of a cultural victory lap. In the past year alone, the early-'90s punk feminist movement has seen some noteworthy milestones: Sara Marcus published Girls to the Front, a terrific and meticulously documented history of the movement; NYU's Fales library opened the first comprehensive archive of riot grrrl zines; and Kathleen Hanna was honored with a star-studded (Tavi Gevinson! Kim Gordon! Kim Gordon's kid!) Knitting Factory tribute show filmed for an upcoming documentary on her career. Even before it was announced last week that her one-time solo project Julie Ruin is heading back into the studio, Hanna's name seemed to be hovering in the air. Even The New York Times could not resist waxing nostalgic.

Into this fortuitous moment comes the DVD release of Who Took the Bomp?—Kerthy Fix's documentary chronicling Hanna's feminist electro-punk band's final tour in 2004. The recently launched D.C. queer web zine Where the Girls Go screened the film on Saturday night to a sold-out crowd crammed into the imaginatively decorated (life-size, zine-style cut-outs of the band greeted attendees in the doorway), and woefully un-air-conditioned Gold Leaf Studios. The event brought together fans young and old, united by a passion for feminist punk, radical politics, and also that really gross and universally leveling feeling of sweat pooling in the small of your back.

Coupling sequin-laden performance montages with fly-on-the-wall tour footage and interviews with band members, Who Took the Bomp? explores the personal politics that animated Le Tigre over its eight-year run. Worn out from riot-grrrl infighting and the media's misrepresentation of the movement, Hanna—along with beatmaker Johanna Fateman and future queer heartthrob JD Samson—started the band in 1998 as a way to infuse messages of feminist empowerment into the traditionally dudely world of electro music.

Like any good rock doc, Who Took the Bomp? indulges in requisite moments of backstage goofiness. And if this is Le Tigre’s Don’t Look Back, the role of Donovan is played dutifully here by Slipknot, with whom the ladies shared the bill at New Zealand’s Big Day Out Festival and plot, with sarcastic glee, a backstage meeting. (Fateman pretends to have a younger brother who’s a fan, and poses for a picture with one band member whose look can only be described as Hellraiser chic. “Timmy will be so excited!” Hanna squeals.)

But the film's at its best when it digs a little deeper, interrogating the difficulties of bringing queer positivity to a wide audience (the band decides to pull an ad from Jane magazine when the publication shrinks from using the word lesbian) and Hanna’s notoriously prickly relationship with mainstream media. Hanna was always uncomfortable when the media portrayed her as the figurehead of riot grrrl, and here she voices her frustration at journalists who continue to define her legacy through the famous men she’s often associated with. Riffing on another trusty rock doc trope (foreign journalists say the darnedest things!), Fix focuses on an encounter between Hanna and a radio host in New Zealand who won’t stop asking her questions about one of these men in particular. “I understand you once wrote some graffiti on Kurt Cobain’s wall,” he says. “I wrote, ‘Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” Hanna answers, in the polite but wearied tone of somebody who’s had to answer that question incessantly over the past 20 years.

Hanna’s not the only focal point, though. Fix’s film provides well-rounded portraits of the other band members, including Samson, the proudly mustachioed lesbian who’s gone onto become the frontwoman of the band MEN and music’s most visible poster girl for female masculinity. Being a queer icon, the film shows, can be trying. While in New Zealand, she goes on what she thinks to be a date with a woman, but when the woman goes on a homophobic rant about how “nasty” lesbians are, Samson realizes there’s been a misunderstanding: This woman thinks Samson is a gay man. She leaves without correcting her and relays the incident to her bandmates with humor, but it’s maybe the most poignant moment in the film.

Fix, who co-directed last year’s Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, doesn’t quite plumb the depths of how provocative a moment this was in Le Tigre’s history (er, herstory?): Having just released its unexpectedly glossy major-label debut This Island, the band was courting a new audience and risking alienating fans who’d originally identified with its DIY ethos. But even if this dynamic is only implicit in the film, it still adds up to an engaging portrait of a band navigating the conflicts of making music with a message.

"I always fear erasure," Hanna says toward the end of the film, expressing requisite worries about her band’s legacy. But Who Took the Bomp? should serve as a lasting document of Le Tigre’s message—and the packed house sweating it out on Saturday night proof that there’s are still plenty of people still willing to listen.

The first Big Star album I ever bought was Third/Sister Lovers. This was a mistake. I'd seen the band referenced in what seemed to be every third review at the time (partly because Kurt Cobain discovered that he suddenly had control over a lot of people's eardrums), and when I decided to see what the fuss was about, the record guide I consulted rated Third/Sister Lovers as Big Star's only five-star album. And so I was introduced to what was to become my second-favorite band of all time by listening to it fall apart.

It was intensely uncomfortable, and without any context, it made practically zero sense. It was like wanting to know more about this Neil Young fellow and starting out with Tonight's the Night. I honestly can't say what made me investigate Big Star further; it could be that I had discovered the Bangles' “September Gurls” cover and figured there was more to the story than Third/Sister Lovers indicated. Whatever the reason, I got #1 Record/Radio City—the CD I should have bought in the first place and still my pick for the greatest value of any single disc ever manufactured—and my love affair with Big Star officially began.

Though I did the whole thing backwards, the conversion, when it happened, was quick and thorough. Within a year or two, I had transcribed the guitar parts for a bunch of Big Star and posted them to Usenet. “O My Soul” went up the day before I graduated from college; it felt like the last exam of my college career. They're floating around the Internet to this day. Several years ago, a band for which I was playing bass decided it wanted to cover “September Gurls.” It was my transcription that the guitarists printed out. And, as it happens, they altered it to make fun of me for spending my time on such nonsense in the first place.

I never saw Big Star live, though I did catch Alex Chilton doing a solo show at the Paradise in Boston in 2001. Normally, I'd stand in the middle of the room to get a decent sound mix, but this time, I planted myself right against the stage so I could watch him without any obstructions. He was as cantankerous as advertised, playing mostly oldies like “Volare” and the occasional nugget from his solo career.

Even so, he played two Big Star songs. Unfortunately, I don't remember what they were. What I do remember is that at one point, someone called out for “September Gurls.” He motioned to the bassist and drummer that made up his entire band and pointed out that they were one guitar player short. I don't know what prompted me to shout “I'll do it!,” but I did, and Chilton looked at me and said, “Well, come on up.”

And I froze. I had no idea if he was serious or not, and if he wasn't, I didn't want to be... well, that guy. It could have been two seconds later, it could have been 10, it could have been a minute, but the next thing I knew, Chilton had begun the next song, and I remained paralyzed right where I had been all night. To this day, I still don't know whether he was joking or not when he offered me a chance to play one of the few utterly perfect songs in the world alongside the man responsible for its existence.

It was a missed opportunity, maybe. But that was just one; Big Star's entire story plays like a parade of them. Chilton lived through his band's failure to get anybody who was there at the time to pay attention, and he shrugged it off, not without some frustration, and just kept moving. And though he died yesterday at the age of 59, he lived long enough to do a few victory laps as several generations discovered what he'd been doing for a few years at the top of the '70s. Even if they did it in the wrong order.

Morning, y'all! Pep-pep's back, after an extended leave of absence, and he's ready to link your mind! For starters, WaPo runs yet another Facebook article; this time, there's a news peg on which to hang your irritation. Also, the Boston Globe really demonstrates its reach by patting the shit out of its own back: The paper's best nonfiction of the year essay (dudes–list this stuff from here on out), ranks Last Lion as the second best nonfiction books of the year, right after Sen. Ted Kennedy's memoir. Is there an embargo on real books in Beantown? Or, perhaps books not written by the Globe staff?

- Can I just say this, please? Man On the Moon is underrated. I am listening to this album right now, and it has me thinking I can do anything. Also, it's not like Kid Cudi is going on and on about how he's the best rapper in the world, which is something that hip-hop fans seem to demand from their idols. Kudi is more like Cobain, who was always kind of down on shit and never ever ever sang over and over, "I am the best grunge singer alive, I am the best grunge singer, bow down to the best grunge singer." HAHA I just paraphrased Jay-Z and I bet you all bobbed your heads. Anyway, Kudi as Cobain: Discuss.

- I ate this for dinner last night. Will I be gassy today? Stay tuned!

- Fall asleep in tauntaun guts, wake up in the same broken  home where you fell asleep in tauntaun guts!

- Gang pictures.

- Read this essay by Joe Queenan, which is about bad cover art, and tell me how much you hate it when some troglodyte points at the post-movie-release re-issue of your fave Cormac McCarthy book and says, "Isn't that a movie?" Or, as Queenan puts it: "I do not know what Huck looked like as Twain imagined him, any more than I know how F. Scott Fitzgerald envisioned Jay Gatsby. But Gatsby cannot look like Robert Redford, and the most memorable character in American fiction cannot look like the diabolically cuddly Elijah Wood. Cannot, cannot, cannot."

Photo via Official Star Wars Blog, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

By all rights, Dave Grohl should have faded from public view once Nirvana ended in a final, irreversible decision by Kurt Cobain 15 years ago.

At most, he should have either squeezed out a brief, increasingly irrelevant solo career or found another group where he could pound away in the background while someone else claimed the spotlight. He was a vital member of a seminal band but ultimately a secondary one who didn’t write songs in Nirvana until it was too late to matter and never got a single vocal as prominent as even Krist Novoselic’s mocking refrain of “Get Together” at the start of “Territorial Pissings.”

For crying out loud, Grohl was the drummer. There’s a whole field of jokes devoted to drummers. (For instance: What was the last thing the drummer said before getting kicked out of the band? “Hey, guys, I wrote these songs….”) There was no reason to expect him to do much more than coast on his past association.

Things didn’t work out that way. In the wake of the sudden end of his iconic band, he formed a merely very, very good one. Unlike, say, George Harrison, Grohl didn’t chafe under the yoke of being a sideman to Nirvana’s resident genius. He simply transformed himself into a frontman, something toward which he’d previously shown no aspirations, to such a successful and odds-defying degree that there might not be any precedent for it in the history of rock ’n’ roll. In terms of Foo Fighters’ longevity and consistent popularity (though not, of course, musical style), it’s as though Mitch Mitchell had followed the Jimi Hendrix Experience by forming Queen.

Both sides of Grohl’s career are captured by the simultaneous release of Nirvana’s Live At Reading CD/DVD (Geffen) and Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits (RCA) on Nov. 3. One offers a fleeting glimpse of a generation-defining band at its impossible peak, just before the experience began to sour; the other is a survey of a more or less uninterrupted run of solid work that shows no signs of flagging after 14 years. For those keeping track, that’s three times his tenure in Nirvana. More sobering, it’s also more than half as long as Cobain’s lifespan.

Unsurprisingly, the focus of Reading is more on Cobain than Grohl (or anything else, really). It’s a stark reminder of just how much Cobain was blessed with: surfer-boy good looks, a feral intelligence, unquantifiable charisma, immeasurable talent. All he truly lacked was a way to deal with the world. Music worked for a while, but only a while. He tried family, which came too late to fully take. And he tried drugs, which would eventually backfire in the worst possible way.

On Aug. 30, 1992, though, with steam rising up from a massive festival audience, Cobain gritted his teeth, smiled (so it would appear) exactly once, spattered blood on his pickups, and solidified his band’s stature so thoroughly that he would spend the rest of his life trying to bring it back down to earth (that his efforts had the opposite effect demonstrates how complete the apotheosis was).

The piecemeal From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, released in 1996, might be a more comprehensive live album, but Reading has the advantage of being all of one piece, each song building off the energy of the last. Cobain’s raging antipathy is so entrancing that neither the camera nor the lights can seem to be bothered with Grohl, but he’s crucial to the performance: Steady and firm, he held back the chaos that Novoselic gleefully pursued and that Cobain couldn’t fight by giving them something to which they could tether themselves.

On Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits, the chaos is gone, replaced by a controlled intensity (control being necessary for a project that began as a one-man band). It confirms how sharp Grohl’s songwriting, singing, and guitar playing—all things he largely kept under wraps while in Nirvana—truly are. While none of it is quite as soul-shattering as what Cobain was capable of (the guitars, in particular, are harder and more hammer-like, as opposed to corrosively acidic), the upside is that Grohl, unlike Cobain, could walk away with his soul intact.

That doesn’t devalue a catalog that includes excellent songs like “This Is a Call,” “Monkey Wrench,” “Times Like These” and “The Pretender,” which span a decade and a half without any discernible drop in quality or ferocity. It just means that Grohl found a way to remain at the forefront of mainstream rock but at a less headlong, more manageable pace. It means that he figured out something Cobain could never handle: how to sustain a career at the top.