MAYHEM: LOS ANGELES RAVES, Mel Gibson Sex Bob-Omb ReMix, The Mad Men School of Seduction: Lotharios of Sterling Cooper, L.A. Beck/Scott Pilgrim

L.A. Officials Question Raves After Electric Daisy Carnival Death, Injuries

Los Angeles area doctors and the city's mayor are questioning the use of publicly owned facilities like the L..A. Coliseum for concerts and rave events, in the aftermath of the death of a 15-year old girl and hundreds of injuries at a massive event last weekend.

The 14th annual Electric Daisy Carnival drew more than 180,000 people over two days to a dance music festival featuring primarily DJs, including Moby, Deadmau5, Basement Jaxx, Swedish House Mafia and the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am, among many others.

According to the Los Angeles Times, because of the size of the event, paramedics were stationed at an on-site command post and over the two days, 226 injuries were reported, 114 of which required attention at hospitals.

A 15-year old girl died Tuesday from injuries related to a drug overdose, with Fox 11 News reporting that the girl's family today decided to remove her from life support after she hadn't shown signs of life since being admitted to a hospital over the weekend.

According to a report in the L.A. Weekly, the Coliseum's commission was called to to a special meeting to review whether promoters of such events have undertaken proper heath and safety precautions.

"On behalf of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission, I express our dismay and deep sadness on the death of the young woman who attended the Electric Daisy Carnival,'' Barry A. Sanders, president of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission said. "We send our sincere condolences to her family."

Cathy Chidester, director of the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Systems agency, told the L.A. Times that officials treat raves at the Coliseum like a "multi-casualty incident," which she said was similar to planning for a disaster like the Chatsworth Metrolink train crash, which killed 25 and left more than 130 others injured.

Dr. Marc Futernick, medical director of emergency services at California Hospital Medical Center, called it "unconscionable" for a publicly owned facility like the Coliseum to host raves.

"I don't know why our elected...leaders would allow these activities to take place," Futernick said.

The city's mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, responded by telling a local news outlet that "We're going to have to assess whether or not these events will occur in the future."

Electric Daisy Carnival was produced and promoted by Pasquale Rotella, whose Insomniac, Inc. stages big raves and events in dozens of cities, including upcoming Southern California events Audiotistic, Nocturnal Festival on September 25, Together As One on New Years Eve 2010 with 50,000 attendants and in 2011 Beyond Wonderland with 40,000 attendants, according to the event's promotional materials.

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Electronic Music Festival Hard L.A. Canceled

Hard L.A., the electronic music festival scheduled for July 17 at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, has been canceled, a representative for the event has confirmed. Published reports suggest the event was called off due to security concerns.

"Due to events beyond our control, Hard L.A. M.I.A. July 17 has been cancelled," a statement from the festival said.

L.A. Officials Question Raves After Electric Daisy Carnival Death

Los Angeles Times blog Pop & Hiss reports that documents provided by sources for a number of the acts on Hard L.A.'s lineup indicate that the festival was canceled in light of new scrutiny and logistics demanded of large-scale electronic music concerts in Los Angeles.

Some of the acts scheduled to appear at the July 17 festival include M.I.A., N*E*R*D, Die Antwoord, Flying Lotus and Rye Rye. Information on how to obtain refunds for the canceled date will be provided July 13 at hardfest.com.

The festival's statement also noted that the Hard Summer Music Festival, slated for Aug. 7 at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, will continue as planned. Tickets for Hard L.A. M.I.A. are automatically valid for the Hard Summer Music Festival, which will feature Soulwax, Crystal Castles, Major Lazer, Erol Alkan, Diplo, Digitalism and others.

The Hard NYC event featuring M.I.A. at Governors Island on July 24 will also continue as planned, according to the statement.

Concern over safety at electronic music events has risen following the drug-related death a 15-year-old girl who attended last month's Electric Daisy Carnival in Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles Times, 226 injuries (114 of which required attention at hospitals) were reported during the two-day dance event.

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Fresh Squeezed, another L.A. electronic music festival planned for the City of Industry, was canceled after difficulties securing a location and permits in light of the new public scrutiny.

The Hard L.A. cancellation comes after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted last week to establish a task force to examine and "enhance rave safety.” The motion to establish the task force followed a prior call by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to establish a rave moratorium, and the Coliseum had already announced a temporary ban on new contracts with rave operators as they consider whether to allow another such event.

A spokesman for Yaroslavsky’s office said he was unaware that Hard L.A. had been canceled.

“Zev has never said anything about rave-type events at any other venue other than the Coliseum,” the spokesman said. Calls were deferred to the mayor’s office, who have not yet responded to requests for comment.

Beyond Hard, the summer's other big electronica event, the Love Festival, is scheduled to take place at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, next to the Coliseum, on Aug. 21. It was unclear how the call for a moratorium might affect that event, although a formal decision could be made as early as July 16, when the Coliseum Commission is slated to meet and discuss the Love Festival’s fate.

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Panda Bear, the Rapture, Sleep and dozens more to play the 

FYF Fest in downtown L.A.

The FYF Fest has released the lineup for the annual day-long shindig, which will occur on Sept. 4 at the Los Angeles State Historic Park downtown. The festival, put on by FYF Productions, features a virtual who's who of the underground rock scene, and this year includes, among dozens of others, performances by dance-punk luminaries the Rapture, Panda Bear (of Animal Collective), stoner-rock legends Sleep (who will be performing half of their epic "Dopesmoker," and half of their "Holy Mountain"), Dead Man's Bones, !!!, the Mountain Goats, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Wavves, Best Coast, and the rest of the list that appears to your right.

The festival will occupy the same location that has been then center of concerns of late after the annual Hard L.A. electronic music festival announced that it was canceling its July 17 concert and merging it with the upcoming Hard Summer festival on Aug. 7. Last year's FYF Fest went off without a hitch at the park (though some attendees endured a long wait in line before gaining admission), and ended up being one of the festivals of the year.

In fact, FYF has been on a roll of late. Last month it was announced that the company would be co-promoting the upcoming Matador 21 party in Las Vegas, and just yesterday released news of two upcoming weekend performances by One Day As a Lion, the new band fronted by Rage Against the Machine's Zack de la Rocha.

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VIRAL VIDEO: Mel Gibson's Abusive Rant Gets a Dance Remix

Many people have heard Mel Gibson's profanity-laden, verbally abusive rant against his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, in which the actor makes veiled death threats and hurls racist and sexist epithets like he did spears in "Braveheart." But have you heard it set to synths?

In the below YouTube video, created by someone with imitable editing skills, Gibson's tirade is cut and rearranged to a dance beat, while a montage of images from his movies and shots are spliced together to make the whole thing even more ridiculous.

Of course, while the concept is funny, Gibson's rant is still no less disturbing -- so listen at your own risk.

[Warning: This video contains extremely graphic and disturbing content.]

mel gibson rant racist remix fake tits bitch in heat oksana grigorieva passion christ braveheart perez hilton recording drunk techno house mad max road warrior leaving las vegas whore

The Mad Men School of Seduction: Lotharios of Sterling Cooper.

Take a cue from from Campbell, Cosgrove, Kinsey, and the great Roger Sterling.

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Sexbobomb: The rock 'n' roll inspiration behind 'Scott Pilgrim's' Beck-led Sex-Bob-Omb

Edgar Wright's "Bryan Lee O'Malley's six-part "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" Oni Press: 2004

What film will be the breakout sensation of Comic-Con International 2010? You might want to put your money on Edgar Wright's "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," which plugs its pop-culture amp into comic books, comedy and cool-kid music. Todd Martens, the lead writer on Pop&Hiss, the must-read music blog, will be our go-to writer on the film here at Hero Complex, and today he maps the music landscape where the film roams.

One doesn't have to get far into Bryan Lee O'Malley's six-part "Scott Pilgrim" series to realize some of the inherent challenges in bringing the pop-culture-obsessed comic to the big screen. From the first few pages of "Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life," released by Oni Press back in 2004, O'Malley's creation unfolds like a video game being played at a frame-by-frame pace.

Scott Pilgrim Bryan Lee OMallley Oni At its heart, it's a tale of dating mishaps and a fear of relationships unknown, and the commitment-phobic themes unfold amid the series' grand martial arts-like fight scenes with "evil" ex-boyfriends. Yet Michael Cera, who has the title role in Edgar Wright's cinematic interpretation "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," wasn't worried about the metaphor being obscured by the cartoonish fight scenes and the outlandish plot, in which Scott Pilgrim must win the heart of Ramona Flowers by taking on her seven ex-boyfriends.

That's largely because "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," due Aug. 13, is not only a comic book movie; it's arguably this summer's most rock 'n' roll-centric film. Cera's Pilgrim is a twentysomething slacker who despite declaring himself awesome is a below-average bass player. With half a dozen original songs, including pieces from Silver Lake's Beck, "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" will live and die by its music as much as its action and script.

"Whenever you see a band in a movie, the music is barely passable," Cera said. "It's like when you see a film, and someone is writing a book. Whenever you hear excerpts of the writing, it's just terrible. You're like, 'That's what they're writing?' It's kind of the same theory."

In the books and corresponding film, Pilgrim performs in the floundering Sex Bob-Omb, a name inspired by a character in Super Mario Brothers video game series. O'Malley wrote out some of the band's lyrics in the comics, and the snotty, rejection-focused verses are drenched in punk rock. Yet Sex Bob-Omb vocalist Stephen Stills, played by Mark Weber in the film, is wailing away at an acoustic guitar, and O'Malley has earlier noted that alt-country forebears such as Uncle Tupelo were on his mind while writing the first book.

Such details would seem to lend multiple possible directions for Sex Bob-Omb, which Wright and music supervisor/composer Nigel Godrich entrusted to Beck. The first thing Beck accomplished was putting the cast's minds at ease, ensuring that the music would be taken seriously and not played for pure camp effect. "Once Beck agreed to do it," Cera said, "I felt good."

O'Malley recalled some of his early discussions with Wright on the sound of Sex Bob-Omb. He said he tried to sell the director on Times New Viking, a Midwest punk band signed to Matador and steeped in rudimentary, low-fi noise. Wright, however, wasn't having it, at least not until the pair met with Beck in his tour bus at San Francisco's Outside Lands music festival.

"We wanted them to sound like a garage band," O'Malley said. "We wanted them to sound rough and really distorted. There's this band called Times New Viking who had just released an album, and I was like, 'These guys are perfect.'"

"Edgar wasn't completely taken with them," O'Malley continued. "So we start down with Beck, and the first thing he said was, 'I think they should sound like Times New Viking.' So Beck totally understood what we were going for. Edgar and I just kind of looked at each other." (One can hear a snippet of Beck's Times New Viking-inspired tunes in the "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" trailer below).

Wright notes, however, that his initial Sex Bob-Omb vision wasn’t too far removed from Times New Viking. The director said he suggested something more akin to Japanese garage rockers Guitar Wolf, a band he had taken to after seeing zombie comedy “Wild Zero,” and a group that puts a slightly more old-school rockabilly spin on its roughed up sound.

“I like Times New Viking,” Wright said, and “the link between Guitar Wolf and Times New Viking is that they’re mastered too loud. They’re the only two bands I can think of in my iTunes like that. Guitar Wolf’s ‘Jet Generation’ has a sticker on the back that says it has been mastered too loud and it shouldn’t be played at full volume. Times New Viking is the same. They’re designed to screw up a playlist.”

Though only four Sex Bob-Omb songs are on the soundtrack, of which The Playlist has compiled a detailed track-by-track, O'Malley said there's plenty of Sex Bob-Omb songs in the vaults.

"Beck writes a dozen songs in one day," O'Malley said. "So that’s what [Beck and Godrich] did. They wrote about 21 songs, and we picked the ones we liked. That whole thing was done in one day."

In the film, the songs are performed in part by the cast, with Weber on lead vocals and Cera singing back-up. It hasn't been announced whether the Beck-sung versions would be released, but Cera and O'Malley each hinted that it was a more-than-likely possibility.

One thing, however, is for certain: The full Sex Bob-Omb lyrics written by O'Malley in the first book, a break-up anthem about a couple attempting and failing to work things out ("You've been out partying with guys I've never met / Drinking beer and smoking cigarettes"), did not worm their way into the film. O'Malley made that much clear: "I didn't want to be responsible for that."

-- Todd Martens

RECENT AND RELATED

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