It’s a hole-in-the-wall restaurant found in the back alleys of Hongdae,  a district full of vinyl-spinning basement bars, shoe-packed boutiques, cook-at-your-table barbecue and hand-drip coffee. And yes, This is Chicken is definitely worth looking for.

A couple of years ago, you might have seen Ji W. Kim riding around Hongdae on a scooter delivering fried chicken. But he chose to start this place, a restaurant he can call his own, and with a grammatically unwieldy name to boot.

This is Chicken features a short menu, with Woody Chicken and Rude Chicken among its house specialties. There’s also beer on tap, to keep the customers spirited amid scratchy recordings of old reggae and ska music playing in the background. Named after the 2006 British skinhead movie This is England, this restaurant may seem like a Frankenstein of ideas stitched together– a Korean chicken restaurant, reggae, ska and British skinheads.  You might start to question your own sanity. What is going on here? What brings these random things together?

Simply put, Ji loves chicken. He’s fascinated by the culture portrayed in This is England, and he can’t get enough of reggae and ska. Rather than make a restaurant to suit other people’s tastes, he conceptualized one for the person he knows best: himself.

Will This is Chicken be a hit? Will customers connect with the owner’s eclectic and obscure vision? If you navigate through the back alleysof Hongdae and stumble upon this establishment, you’ll find Ji happily frying up chicken in the kitchen, listening to his favorite songs. Then you will realize that Ji has already achieved success in his own right– as he does what he loves best and plays by his own rules.

But you better order your chicken early, because This is Chicken is 86’d on all their stock almost every night.

This is one of the better blogs dedicated to old posters from the 80′s and 90′s hardcore shows.

Updated twice daily, hardcoreshowflyers.com has a cool ‘On this day…’ app at the bottom of the page. You can set it to any day and it will give you the flyers for classic shows that were happening on that date in punk-years gone by.

Hailing from Australia, Royal Headache follow in the immediate footsteps of the much-loved Eddy Current Suppression Ring, reminding the rest of the world that punk rock used to be kind of fun. More soulful than ferocious, and more love-lorn than politically-inclined, Royal Headache are a just a frenzied pop-punk party in a bottle. While the guitars, bass, and drums are maybe just a step above ‘solid’ (which is fine, this is still punk after all), singer Shogun’s voice pulls the entire band into the upper echelons of Rock n Roll greatness, encompassing everything you could ever want from a frontman – frantic energy, great range, and, dare I say, soul.

image via facebook.com/pages/MIAMI-CHUM-BUCKET/314715166530

The loss of the Firefly — a collective house, resource center, activist meeting group, and alternative performance space — dealt a huge blow to Miami’s d.i.y. scene this past February. However, a new venue has appeared to fill in at least the performance-space aspect of that void. Miami Chum Bucket opened at the end of March, and over the past month has started hosting regular shows.

Modeled after long-running collective punk spaces like Berkeley’s Gilman Street, the all-ages warehouse venue is a members-only affair, technically. For $1, you get a membership card good for forever, which grants you access to every show. Each show then carries its own cover charge, which goes towards paying touring bands, the space’s rent and utilities, and, occasionally, other nonprofits that benefit the neighborhood.

Beyond that, you have to follow a few basic rules: no violence or stage diving, no graffiti outside the club, and no vandalism in the neighborhood. (That neighborhood is Allapattah, a more or less economically depressed area west of the beaten hipster paths in Wynwood.)

Beyond that, members can all help decide on future activities and rules, and access the space for their own band practices, workshops, or just about anything else conceivable. So far, events have included local shows, shows by established touring acts like World/Inferno Friendship Society, and talks by activists from groups like Food Not Bombs.

The venue attracts a young crowd, which is welcome in a city in which there’s a lack of constructive evening activity for those under 18. Meanwhile the venue continues to raise its profile by booking shows at age-restricted venues like Churchill’s, which help to raise more funds for the space and attract those of legal age to check it out.

If you have to listen to one German band for the rest of 2011, I would strongly suggest you give 206 a closer look. Even though they’ve been around for nearly a year and a half, 2011 is going to be the biggest year so far for this band from the musical wasteland of Leipzig/Halle. Singer Timm Völker, bassist Leif Ziemann and drummer Florian Funk played non-stop in every shitty little club all over Germany, before they were finally discovered by the Pope of German punk music: Alfred Hilsberg, who immediately signed them to his record label ZickZack. Even if you have missed out on 206 in the sweaty underground clubs of Germany, you can relax and be happy because, with the release of their record “Republik der Heiserkeit”, you will be able to listen to the future of German punk from February from the comfort of your own home, without going out, let alone being anywhere near the musical wasteland of Leipzig/Halle.

I’ve been seeing a handful of these asymmetric partially-buzzed haircuts wandering around Atlanta over the last month or two. It’s a good look, and it’s nice to see it making the migration from punk/crust girls to trend setting hipsters — mostly because the hipster girls I’ve seen rocking a side buzz tend to be a little more experimental with their haircuts and coloring.

For your reference, this is what that cut used to look like, in its original Australian punk girl format:

I don’t often feel old the way that a lot of my friends seem to, when they are constantly remarking that they are “too old” to do this, that or the other thing. But when I recently went to a birthday party for a friend who is turning 18, I felt maybe a little bit old. But not too much. A band called Heller Keller played. I had heard some people talk about them before, but I figured, based on the other kinds of music these people were talking about, that they would be some like… horrifically boring folk band or something. As it turns out Heller Keller is totally awesome, and I want to semi-stalk them now, but that seems extra creepy since they look like a bunch of little kids. They remind me of the kind of hardcore I listened to when I was turning 18, and that made me feel pretty happy.

Speaking of bands I listened to when I was 18, I went and saw XBXRX play at the Smell recently. It felt a little weird since I’m so accustomed to all of the bands that I listened to when I was 18 having broken up by the time I was maybe 19 or 20 or so, but they’re still around. I haven’t listened to anything they’ve recorded in years, and I don’t know anyone who listens to them, so I had no idea what to expect. I think they’ve gotten better; it seemed a lot harsher, and I was really into it.

This summer I have been revisiting Siouxie Sioux A LOT. Far from a new artist, Siouxie exploded onto the scene in the late 70′s and took over! Her interesting, comprehensive and passionate songwriting combined with fantastic personal style and stage presence led to her becoming one of the most iconic singers of the last few decades.

Pictured above with Robert Smith, from The Cure, Siouxie of Siouxie and the Banshees (and later, of The Creatures) translates seamlessly into modern culture.

A million little gothic gals were inspired by Siouxie’s personal style, myself being one of them, when I was in high school. I had her single for “Kiss Them For Me”, with a little-known B-side “Return”, as a second track. I played it until it started skipping. For more popular Siouxie tracks, turn to Twice Upon a Time: The Singles. Fantastic.

Above, with fellow Banshees.

Vancouver ravers of a certain generation will remember the Theatre E. I do; it was there that I first linked up with the merry band of lunatics that would later become my close friends in Vancouver ambient outfit, Team Lounge. What was an old movie house in Vancouver’s downtown east side was repurposed as a home for at that time, glorious cascades of electronic music. Now under new ownership, it serves as a glorious home for music yet again.

My recent run -in with the glorious madness that was industrial legends Chemlab and 16 Volt was my first return, and the movie style seating lead to a very intriguing sight. You don’t see seats like that filled with goths decked to the nines too often. The Rickshaw seems to have filled a gap where the late lamented Cobalt’s shadow lay for a bit. Touring punk and metal bands now have a place to see and Vancouver has another appropriately sized venue in which to get its entertainment. It’s glorious.

The big neon sign out front harkens back to a day long forgotten by the young Vancouverites that will file in to see Isis, Caribou and dying Fetus in the next while. East Hastings was an entertainment hub in another time, when neon signs like the one out front of the legendary Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret. It’s also a sign that this may be returning and Vancouver’s battle for the right to change No Fun City may be won, not on the brightly light paths of the bridge and tunnel crows, but in the darker corners where imagination can run free.

Vancouver’s nightlife and culture options seem to be taking a turn for the better these days, spurred on by the arrival of two new venues with a direct lineage and a defined connection. Turnover of spaces is nothing new, but when they say we can rebuild them, we’re not just talking about the six million dollar man anymore.

The Cobalt was Vancouver’s home for hardcore. Tucked under a hotel of a very suspicious nature somewhere deep on Main street, it was a place where punks, metal-heads, the homeless, the lost and the damned cold be found raising one fist in the air.

That was until recently when it was bought out by two local bartenders, seeking new territory for their dream. Rebuilt from scratch into a wood laden, dimly lit and amazing sounding hole in the wall, the newly appointed 917 Main has hosted the likes of Kutz, Trus’me and even yours truly on the decks so far and it’s barely been open a month.

The bar is made from timbres taken directly from the support beams of Vancouver’s legendary Richards on Richards, the last sacrifice to Vancouver city council’s need to keep entertainment confined to certain areas of the city.

Richards may be dead, but it’s spirit has simply moved down the block, as its owners have taken the liquor license and established the 560 club in the space of the old A&B Sound records on Seymour. This is where things get interesting.

Four floors, the presence of some of the city’s most serious art galleries and the same booking policy that Richards had before it left us. 560 could just be the breath of fresh air that Vancouver needs and we haven’t even begun to touch the 11-ft ceilinge, 6000 sq. foot unisex bathroom with its own bar, DJ, and dance floor.

Those afraid of a post-Olympic hangover be damned, I’m pretty sure with these spots in full effect, the hangovers for Vancouver are yet to come.