Good things come in twos

That’s it. Dad gum it. We simply cannot compete with Team Scoopy’s news of “hipsters” discovering the joys of swilling Pabst Blue Ribbon and other downmarket suds—Schlitz! Olympia! Regal Select!—at the downtown/Midtown grid’s more proletarian watering holes.

Wait. Um, didn’t the Dennis Hopper character Frank Booth make a convincing case for ordering Pabst Blue Ribbon over Heineken in the 1986 David Lynch film Blue Velvet?

Yes, that movie came out so long ago that the malcontented toddlers who then were just contemplating the ugly social adjustment of kindergarten are now of legal drinking age.

The Scenester digresses, and he’s more of a club-soda chap anyway.

Meanwhile, this just in: A curiously worded communiqué from local offbeat recording act Life Is Bonkers, written in the third person: “As you may or may not know, Life is Bonkers have been reporting on their Web site that they had finished recording their third EP CD, The Punk Rock E.P. Well, as it happened, the recordings just sucked, and plans for The Punk Rock E.P. have been scrapped.”

All is not lost, however. The popular outsider-music duo—Genetic James and Michael Jay Mayhem—will go into the studio (The Boogie Dungeon, to be specific) next month to cut a full-length CD, which should be, barring any more unfortunate musical suckage, out in time for Halloween. The disc will be, in the parlance of wanking rock crits, “eponymously titled” and will contain such gems as “Video Game Blues,” “You Don’t Know ’03,” “I Hate My Family,” “You Get What You Get,” “Fag Hag Harem,” “Kings of the Court,” “I’m an Elephant” and “I’m Gonna Get Away With It.” You can hear those tunes live at Life Is Bonkers’ next gig on Saturday, September 13, at the True Love Coffeehouse, 2406 J Street.

Just in is a homemade CD, priceless, by another local duo, A Dead Cat. The packaging is an award-winner: a piece of flowered pillowcase fabric folded over with the sides safety-pinned together. The recording has that endearing bedroom-cut low-fi resonance, but the songs—written by James Graf—are top-notch, many of them with a sweet Neil Young-filtered-through-Lou Barlow vibe. From such off-key flick-your-Bic anthems as “The Waste Land” to very pretty tunes like “Beat Again” and such anomalies as “Untired Impotency Blues,” with its refrain, “Meghan, you’re making me act weird / Stop it / On second thought,” this 13-song set by Graf and his partner Sean Burford is a keeper. You can order yourself one at A Dead Cat’s Web site, http://adeadcat.cjb.net. And it’s only $3. Beat that, Vivendi Universal.