Great Lenin's Ghost! Václav Havel at the Black Cat

My friend LL Cool J stopped by the Czech Embassy last night to take in a documentary about and performance by the Plastic People of the Universe, a Czech band formed by members of pyschadelic acts such as the Primitives in response to the Soviet invasion and rollback of the Prague Spring in 1968. Cool movie and cool band, he reports, though they're getting a little long in the tooth. So all you bastards who think you're so great because you looove Gogol Bordello—well, the two bands aren't actually explicitly related. But! if they were, GB would find themselves deep in debt to PPotU's legacy, so you may want to check out PPotU at the Black Cat tonight to dispel any notions that you're a poseur Slavophile. If not for them, then to maybe get a sight of Václav Havel, who's supposed to be in house at the Red Room proper tonight.

Chock this one up as yet another telling last nail in the Soviet coffin: tonight one may see Václav Havel, a former dissident who was imprisoned for fomenting against the state before eventually becoming the first president of the independent Czech Republic, nodding his head to the Plastic Peoples of the Universe, a bunch of also-jailed dissident Captain Beefheart acolytes, at a rock hub in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States—where, by the power of the free market, all parties involved may enjoy as many Pilsner Urquells as their hearts may desire and wallots may afford. Let that effin' eagle soar.