Morning, folks!

The mysterious purveyor of the Felice Brothers golden-ticket essay contest named a winner Friday. I’ll share the winning essay here later today, but here’s a taste of the author’s pathos at work:

I don't know how I missed out. But don't make me sit at home alone on Friday night, listening to Adventures of the Felice Brothers Vol. 1, masturbating in the dark, and waiting for the tears to come.

As it turned out there were no real winners at the sold-out show at the Rock & Roll Hotel that night. The gig started out promising before someone in the front row teased the musicians that their beloved Yankees were about to be eliminated from the playoffs. The rest of the concert had a spiteful air; the band, visibly pissed, played a lot of uncharismatic new material and never got in sync with the audience. Kudos to the Felice Brothers for being unafraid of veering from their gothic folk-rock wheel house, but this was clearly not their night.

Comedian Louis C.K., by contrast, managed to give a packed Warner Theater an hour and sixteen minutes of new material without losing anyone for a second.

Anyway:

The discordant guitaring of D.C.’s ‘90s hardcore punk scene is apparently not the District’s only six-string legacy; turns out the DMV is also something of a classical-guitar mecca, reports WaPo. Writer Anne Midgette traces the lineage back to Greek immigrant Sophocles Papas, who built the scene back in the ‘20s. Tally another point for the Greeks in the canon of D.C. music—you’ll recall it was another Greek, John “Johnny Boy” Katsouros, who launched erstwhile Washington R&B legend Terry Huff back in the early ‘60s.

Arena Stage opened in its new home. It tweeted all the relevant coverage.

Finally, New York magazine has an article about the death of early 21-century hipsterism—a condensed version of an investigation by the literary journal n+1. The music piece figures most prominently in what the author calls the “Hipster Primitive moment,” when we all grew beards, donned flannel, and pretended the Industrial Revolution never happened. From the article:

Music led the artistry of this phase... Here are the names of some significant bands, post-2004: Grizzly Bear, Neon Indian, Deerhunter, Fleet Foxes, Department of Eagles, Wolf Parade, Band of Horses, and, most centrally, Animal Collective. (On the electronic-primitive side, LCD Soundsystem.) Listeners heard animal sounds and lovely Beach Boys–style harmonies; lyrics and videos pointed to rural redoubts, on wild beaches and in forests; life transpired in some more loving, spacious, and manageable future, possibly of a Day-Glo or hallucinatory brightness.

The n+1 book version, by the way, has contributions by City Paper columnist Moe Tkacik, who, speaking at a Symposium, blamed neo-hipsterism on the era’s big movers: the Internet—for breaking down the barriers to subculture—and China, for enabling the sort of credit flow that would let American Apparel open 200 stores in two years. (She does not venture to explain where the Hipster-primitive animal fetish came from.)

Me? I blame the Internet for how little I am being paid to write this.

Bye!

Good morning! Want to start your day with a mind-fuck? OK!

You can now watch Ramin Bahrani's 2009 short "Plastic Bag" (no relation to this blog's former name) for free, which you most certainly should do, since it stars the voice of Werner Herzog as an emotionally needy plastic bag. Seriously.

Last year, when I interviewed Bahrani—whose three features are fairly serious dramas about the American working poor somewhat in the style of Italian Neorealism—he understandably struck me as puritanical about the kinds of movies he makes. He has little tolerance for cinematic experiences that aren't "real." And he didn't mention "Plastic Bag," even though he premiered it at the Venice Film Festival a few months later. So I'm fairly sure that with the short—which invokes one of the most pretentious cinematic images in recent memory, and deploys one of the international art house's most compelling, if occasionally baffling, oddballs—he's simply yanking our chain.

IN OTHER NEWS:

This blog post thinks way too hard about Wale's shoes.

The McLean Project for the Arts wants your—you guessed it—art.

The Imperial China record, out digitally since last month, can now be purchased in physical form. Read our review.

Yes, Neon Indian does have four publicists.

Seven of the D.C. bands heading to South by Southwest in Austin are playing a show together there.

For Real Estate's Martin Courtney, returning to his native New Jersey  last summer after graduating from college may have been a regressive move, but it also turned out to be a productive one.

"I almost exclusively hang out with people from high school these days," the singer and guitarist says, echoing that common post-collegiate experience of hometown dive bars and procrastinated job searches.

But Courtney also spent last summer writing songs and jamming in his parents' basement with guitarist Matt Mondanile, bassist Alex Bleeker, and drummer Etienne Duguay, laying the groundwork for what is, little more than a year later, one of 2009's most promising new indie-pop acts in a year replete with lo-fi fast-burners. Six months after its first gig, Real Estate—which plays at the Rock & Roll Hotel tonight with Japandroids and Neon Indian—was generating buzz at the South by Southwest festival in Austin and tickling the blogosphere with woozy, summery singles. Now, the band is about to release its self-titled debut on Woodsist Records.

The pitfalls of blog-fueled, late-oughts meritocracy aren't lost Courtney, who says he doesn't expect Real Estate to break down, Wavves-style, anytime soon. "A couple months ago, that really worried me and freaked me out," Courtney says. "But due to circumstances beyond our control"—intermittent access to a recording space and, later, a problem with the finished album's test plate—"our record got pushed back. Now there’s been time for shit to cool off. I hope that now it’s less of a buzz thing and more that we’re just a band that exists."

That music critics and bloggers have covered Real Estate almost as long as it has existed has been "a little nerve-wracking," Courtney says. "It’s kind of annoying when people ask us if we spend a lot of time on the beach."

He says songs like "Beach Comber" and "Atlantic City"—as well as the band's tropical, laid-back vibe—can't be chalked up to a strategy or ethos. They're simply the result of a summer spent writing music by the ocean. Seeing his band boiled down to one-sentence narratives and minute-old labels "can be frustrating," Courtney says. "You cringe a little bit. But I’m starting to realize that some people that write about music just need something to clutch on to as a reference and to make it clearer."

Courtney says he's somewhat vexed by Real Estate's reputation as a lo-fi act—a distinction undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that several more of his high-school classmates, Julian Lynch and the guys behind the Underwater Peoples label, have also released nostalgic-sounding records that are heavy on tape hiss. "If we could record in the studio, I would do it in a second," Courtney says. The Real Estate album, out on Nov. 17, "has definitely got a demo vibe. I think it sounds good for sure, but it’s not a choice we made to sound that way. It’s just the way it is."

Real Estate performs tonight with Japandroids and Neon Indian at the Rock & Roll Hotel at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance, and $12 at the door. Photo courtesy of Real Estate's MySpace page.

It's likely no accident that, at least on cursory listens, Psychic Chasms (Lefse Records) sounds out-of-time and incidental, like the gauzy score to a local-access television spot long relegated to the backwaters of YouTube. Certainly, there's a degraded and lo-fi quality to this debut by Neon Indian, the project of 21-year-old Alan Palomo, who is based in Austin. That hissy, washed-over aesthetic is essential to the 30-minute album, but unlike the other glo-fi acts the blogosphere slobbered over all summer, Psychic Chasms has a productive tension between sound and songwriter.

The latter doesn't always win: As background music, Palomo's songs disappear into a staticky haze. Pay attention, though, and you'll hear sunny, synthy outsider pop that distills everything good about Hall & Oates and The Avalanches, even as it unravels their lessons.

Neon Indian performs with Japandroids and Real Estate at the Rock & Roll Hotel on Oct. 19 at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $15.

Kid Cudi: "You Can Call Me Moon Man"
"You Can Call Me Moon Man," Kanye protege Kid Cudi reveals that he's not from the Midwest, as previously believed, but from the heavens. Specifically, the Moon. And what's it like on the moon? Dark, apparently. Cudi spends most of "You Can Call Me Moon Man" dropping sobering boasts along the lines of "Shit is so damn sick/ No antibiotic could ever fucking stop it/ If you copped it, please O.D." Other lines–"I make immortal songs for the mortals to cruise with,"– imply Cudi might be getting high on hot air.

Gang Gang Dance: "Live @ Southpaw, April 2008"
Just in case you forgot they were out there, Gang Gang Dance recently slipped a full live set into a podcast by Social Registry (the band's US label). Because the concert was taped all the way back in '08 and is largely made up of tunes from the group's last record, Saint Dymphna, so none of this is new, exactly. Then again, the way that the songs "First Communion" and "House Jam" are mashed up here with slurry jams, you might not recognize them right away, anyway.

Six Organs of Admittance: "The Ballad of Charley Harper"
In his paintings, Cincinnati-based artist Charley Harper sought to simplify nature–to create an ordered representation of a complex reality. There's a good chance that Six Organs of Admittance's "The Ballad of Charley Harper," with its slowly cycling melodies, is an homage to that sensibility. Ben Chasny uses simple components–an acoustic guitar, some distortion, a single lyric–to suggest some larger and more elusive mystic truth.