Best Punk Museum

Like punk rock itself, Taquila Mockingbird is full of contradictions. The African-American amazon is an operatic vocalist and an unrepentant Anglophile with a deep and abiding love for the poetry of John Keats, but she also worships the scabrous poetry of Johnny Rotten and John Lydon. Mockingbird, a former curator at the Zero One gallery and booker of the New Wave Theatre TV show, is a walking, talking, punk rock museum. It's not so much that she's some fussy archivist or geeky statistician spouting useless trivia; the outrageously attired, parrot-haired iconoclast is a riotously larger-than-life piece of mobile performance art wherever she goes. "Punk was my home when no one seemed to get me in this world," she explains. The ghosts of her late pals Darby Crash and NWT host Peter Ivers nagged her to commemorate their spirits in a physical, palpable form, so in January Mockingbird opened the Punk Rock Museum at the KGB Gallery, both in downtown L.A. and in a sister location in San Francisco. Refreshingly, the museum gives equal weight to the L.A. and London scenes, with visits from PiL's Martin Atkins and live shows by Alice Bag, Romeo Void's Debora Iyall and Wall of Voodoo's Ravens Moreland. Mockingbird says, "I just got tired of only seeing people at funerals." 1646 N. Spring St., dwntwn. (323) 921-5197, facebook.com/pages/The-Punk-Museum/181951671899036. —Falling James

Source: LA Weekly

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