Before I worked at Washington City Paper, I hung around with a small, unconnected, and unhip coterie of clubgoers who busied themselves between sets by spinning yarns (OK, it was just me and my friend Doug) about the imagined lives of people they kept seeing at shows. There was “Trip Girl,” who meandered as if grooving to music unheard, “The Stomper,” record-store obsessive and master of the inappropriate mosh (he was the guy doing the worm at the Red Aunts show at Phantasmagoria), and there was “Lou Reed Manque,” a character who sported a single pink plastic hair-curler on the front of his jet-black ‘do. We had both missed the whole Nation of Ulysses thing, so how were we to know it was Ian Svenonius—more correctly “James Brown Manque”—whose band, the Make-Up, holds down the Black Cat this Christmas? At 9:30 p.m. at the Black Cat, 1831 14th St. NW. $5. (202) 667-7960. (AD)