Hear Mount Pleasant, a group that has been fighting to bring live music back to the neighborhood’s bars and restaurants, and its foe, the Mount Pleasant Neighborhood Alliance, will both be holding live concerts in Lamont Park this Sunday. In a press release, Hear Mount Pleasant’s Natalie Avery calls it a “weird showdown.”

The concerts will begin two hours apart. Hear Mount Pleasant will present “Black and Latino voices…to speak about neighborhood, identity, race,” according to its Web site, at 4, and will feature *Lilo Gonzales* of Machetres. The Mount Pleasant Neighborhood Alliance’s band, Cheverly Hot Noodle Concern, part of its Music in the Park series, will begin playing at 6.

A couple weeks ago, Hear Mount Pleasant, which aims to promote arts and culture in the neighborhood, hosted a Lamont Park performance of The Evens, and a few months ago, they sponsored a showing of Footloose at Marx Cafe to publicize their cause. The group wants to replace voluntary agreements, brokered by the establishments and the MPNA, with agreements that permit live music, poetry readings, karaoke and dancing.

On Monday Punk Planet magazine announced that its latest issue would be its last, citing “bad distribution deals, disappearing advertisers, and a decreasing audience of subscribers.” It wasn’t surprising news—when the owner of distributor Publishers Group West declared bankruptcy last December a lot of independent publishers took a huge hit—but it was still sad to hear.

In the mid-’90s the biggest punk zine out there was Maximumrocknroll—a finger-staining rag that was forever lecturing you about something or other when its prose wasn’t outright unreadable. Stepping into that arena, Punk Planet made the genre feel like something that wasn’t trapped in 1982—its spiritual point of reference was the Ian MacKaye who started Fugazi, not the Ian MacKaye who started Minor Threat—and it took a self-critical, follow-the-money attitude toward its own scene without being ridiculously doctrinaire about it.

That might be PP’s greatest legacy: it took punk so seriously that it was willing to apply real reportorial energy into it. In 1999, when I was working on a story about the Dead Kennedys suing each other, I quickly learned that PP had done some fine advance work on the story and had the (convoluted) facts of the case straight. In time, I got to know one of the zine’s editors in San Francisco; when he asked me to write a blurb for the first edition of its excellent collection of interviews, We Owe You Nothing, I was more than happy to pitch in. And I was thrilled when I was asked to contribute a story about a group of activists who changed the signs on San Francisco’s Bush Street to Puppet Street the night before Dubya’s first inauguration.

Still, I don’t recall so much as flipping through an issue of Punk Planet in the past five years. Maybe it started sucking, though I doubt that. Maybe the Web killed it: Thanks to blogs, you no longer have to go to a record store and find PP to read poorly written, wrongheaded reviews of CDs that five people care about. (The zine’s enthusiasm was infectious, though: Surely I wasn’t the only person who got suckered into buying a Snapcase album because of something PP wrote.) Maybe the generation that grew up with the zine got cynical and realized that doing stuff like changing street names in the dark of night is ultimately a toothless gesture. More likely, though, the means by which punk-loving, politically aware people interact with one another no longer involves a nicely designed, perfect-bound magazine. Whatever that replacement is, it has big shoes to fill.

As reported last week in the New York Times and the Akron Beacon Journal, Alan Canfora—who was shot in the wrist during the Kent State shootings in 1970—recently released a recording of the incident in which, he claims, the listener can hear members of the Ohio National Guard being ordered to fire upon students. The digitally-enhanced 20-second clip comes from a 30-minute-long recording of the shootings originally made by former Kent State student Terry Strubbe, who recorded the incident on a reel-to-reel machine from his dorm room.

The article goes on to detail where and how Canfora obtained a copy of the original recording, and how he hopes the clip will convince the government to re-open the case. An interesting side note to the story, however, is who Canfora turned to for help with the recording: Dischord Records co-owner and Evens guitarist Ian MacKaye. It’s a revelation that has many people, including those at Idolator.com, scratching their heads:

There’s no explanation of how MacKaye got involved with all of this; perhaps Canfora thought he’d found a political ally in the Minor Threat mastermind, or perhaps he was just really impressed with the remastering job on In On The Kill Taker.

According to MacKaye, he and Canfora met years ago, when Fugazi performed at a benefit show for Canfora’s Kent May 4 Center in the mid-’90s. “He called me asking for advice, and I offered to take the tape to Inner Ear Studios and give him some thoughts on it,” MacKaye says.

“I remember Kent State, when I was eight years old, and it affected me profoundly. It was one of the first times I realized that the government was capable of killing its own people,” MacKaye says. “I studied Kent State in the ’80s. I was fascinated by it. But I’m not as well-acquainted with the case. I wasn’t there. He got shot…He can picture shit that I can’t.”

Though Canfora’s recording is bound to ignite some controversy, MacKaye is quick to downplay his own involvement in the events leading up to its release. “I’m just helping out a friend,” he says. MacKaye says he took the recording to the studio and simply adjusted a few EQ levels and attempted to filter out some of the excess noise.

According to several news sources, Canfora is reported as saying he could hear the words “Right here. Get set. Point. Fire,” yelled out in the enhanced clip. For his part, MacKaye isn’t as adamant as Canfora regarding the contents of the recording. “You can hear someone say, ‘Right here.’…You clearly hear a cadence,” he says. “The problem with the ‘Fire’ is that there’s a woman yelling. When I sent it back, I said, ‘Hey, I don’t think it’s totally evident that you hear a ‘Fire,’ but what you do hear certainly merits a review.’”

“I’m a musician,” D.C. punk legend Ian MacKaye testified yesterday at Councilmember Jim Graham’s roundtable on minors and nightclubs. “You may not know me. You may not even recognize my band Fugazi.” But many music fans across the world do, he said. And “I knowingly have not played a show that was not all ages.”

Addressing Graham and fellow councilmembers, MacKaye spoke passionately and provocatively against any action that would prohibit people below the age of 21, or even 18, from attending venues where music is played and alcohol is served.

“Obviously, this place that you’re talking about is insane. It’s insane,” he said, referring to Smarta/Broadway, where 17-year-old Taleshia Ford was shot and killed early in the morning of Jan. 20. D.C.’s Alcoholic Beverage Control board summarily suspended the club from operating Jan. 24 and a hearing is tentatively scheduled for Monday.

“The problem is the gun. The problem was that club,” MacKaye said. The problem was not the music or the age of the patrons, he said. In fact, he pointed out, venues that provide a gathering place for young people serve an important function, particularly in D.C. “I come from a community of musicians who have worked with venues like the Black Cat, the 9:30 Club,” he said. “Over the years, we’ve really tried to make music accessible.”

Then the punk star got personal. Over the years, MacKaye said he participated in a variety of benefits, some at all-ages venues. He even played a benefit for Whitman-Walker Clinic. “And you, sir, received a check,” he said to Graham, who served as the clinic’s executive director from 1994 until he was elected to the Council in 1998.

“I understand people are scared,” but “teenagers are human beings, and to treat them like fodder for predators or business people is insane,” he said, referring to earlier testimonies and councilmembers’ comments about the dangers of mixing minors with older patrons.

Also at yesterday’s hearing, Black Cat owner Dante Ferrando said he would consider selling his club if the council moved to prohibit underage kids from attending. “At least, I’d have to consider [that] if there were no other options licensing-wise.”

Graham said he would be working with the alcohol board to look at new license classes that would exempt certain music venues from a ban on underage patrons.

I understand you
You’ve got a problem
Now understand me
It’s your problem not mine

—Dag Nasty, “All Ages Show”

Last summer, several teenagers were shot (though none fatally) outside a matinee go-go show at Market Lounge, a venue at the Florida Avenue Market. In fact, shootings and stabbings in (or, more often, outside) clubs are not uncommon in D.C. They can happen late at night or in mid-afternoon, and whether or not alcohol is being served. But when 17-year-old Taleshia Ford was killed last weekend, apparently the accidental victim of a conflict between a patron and a bouncer at 9th & U’s Smarta/Broadway, Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham quickly announced that “this has got to stop.”

By that he means that he hopes to ban under-21s from some establishments that serve alcohol. Exactly what he has in mind is not clear; presumably, he doesn’t intend to bar kids from restaurants, or from such booze-peddling entertainment venues as, say, the Kennedy Center. But Graham’s broad-brush approach could affect clubs like the Black Cat and the 9:30 Club, which still (largely) respect the early-’80s tradition of the all-ages show.

It’s illegal to serve alcohol to minors in D.C., of course. Yet there’s no requirement that under-21s be barred from bars and clubs, many of which are technically restaurants. In the late ’70s, live-music venues often excluded minors, even though the drinking age then was 18 for beer and wine, and all clubs were classified as restaurants. (The “tavern” license is a subsequent addition to the law.) When a lively, teen-oriented punk scene developed, circa 1980, some of the savvier local clubs responded with “hardcore matinees” (at which alcohol was not served) and all-ages shows, which continue to this day.

Washington didn’t invite the all-ages music venue. In fact, it was in San Francisco that such D.C. musicians as Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye (now of the Evens) first saw X’s scrawled on the hands of under-age patrons. But the all-ages show became associated internationally with Washington’s dynamic punk scene, and was quickly adapted into a local insignia: two bars and three X’s, in emulation of the D.C. flag. A few years later, Dag Nasty began performing “All Ages Show.”

Graham has announced a “public roundtable” today [Thursday] to discuss changing the law and possibly banning alcohol-serving all-ages venues. Yet Monday’s Washington Post article on the killing at Smarta/Broadway suggests that laws already on the books could have closed that trouble spot. Open since September 2004, the club had been fined for selling alcohol after hours and had its license suspended for five days. Subsequently, the Post reports, the business was cited for “additional violations,” including allowing patrons to leave with alcoholic beverages in hand.

In other words, Smarta/Broadway had a problem. But solving that problem need not involve changing any city laws, or ending a local tradition with a largely trouble-free history. The gap between Washington’s diverse culture and the D.C. Council’s narrow perception of the city has long been substantial. Let’s hope it’s not wide enough to drive counterproductive new legislation through.