Score of the Millennium (so far)

Except maybe for the Sons of Dolemite script. There's this store on the corner of our street and Sunset that used to be a low end furniture store, layaway plans on dinette suites type of thing, but has fallen on hard times and morphed partially into a thrift store. On poop walk Tuesday morning I caught sight of this thing set out by the front door, and had to check it out.

Ten bucks! What the hell is it? The inscription on the side of the top hat says "Wayne D. Martin Feb 4, 1935 June 20 1993" - is it a grave marker or something? The inscription on the top seems to rule that out. And check out those finely detailed choppers. Lee Lynch's gonna pee his pants when he sees this!

Happy Lupercalia!

"In Roman mythology, Lupercus is a god sometimes identified with the Roman god Faunus, who is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Pan. Lupercus is the god of shepherds. His festival, celebrated on the anniversary of the founding of his temple on February 15, was called the Lupercalia. His priests wore goatskins. The historian Justin mentions an image of "the Lycaean god, whom the Greeks call Pan and the Romans Lupercus," nude save for the girdle of goatskin, which stood in the Lupercal, the cave where Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. There, on the Ides of February, a goat and a dog were sacrificed, and salt mealcakes prepared by the Vestal Virgins were burnt."

(from the Wikipedia entry)

Images: Above, Lupercus; below, a selection of fresh Lupercalia greetings)

F for Formica

A bootleg-quality document of our set at the Mike Kelley tribute at The Box Gallery, Feb 11 2012 is available via the F for Ache blog.

Image: Detail from Mike Kelley's final artwork, created for LAFMS show at The Box

It's Showtime!

‎'F for Ache' will be participating in the Mike Kelley tribute performance at The Box, 805 Traction Ave, L.A. 90013 Saturday Feb 11, 12 -7 PM. It looks like we'll be going on around 2 or 3. Strange that this'll be only our 2nd live performance for an audience.


‎'

Now in Past Tense!

I wasn't really planning to weigh in writing-wise on the passing of Mike Kelley, but Artinfo decided to post my already-completed upcoming Modern Painters cover story on Destroy All Monsters, so here's an excerpt and the link...


"Prior to 1994, if you mentioned the name Destroy All Monsters to punk aficionados, it conjured only a minor footnote: a band in Michigan rock music history known for the participation of the former Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and the MC5 bassist Michael Davis. But by the time its first single, “Bored,” was released in 1978, three of the band’s four original members had left; two of them, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, had headed west to attend graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles.

During the course of the next two decades, Kelley — who died on February 1 — and Shaw rose to the upper echelons of the international art world. Their work prompted considerable interest in the little-heard earlier incarnation of DAM, which also included the filmmaker Cary Loren and the chanteuse Niagara. In 1994, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the music critic Byron Coley issued a lavish three-CD set of archival DAM recordings, which was a revelation to many. It garnered unexpected critical accolades and prompted a series of reunion projects, including performances, recordings, art exhibitions, and publications that brought together various ephemera, such as the collective’s eponymous post-psychedelic, pre-punk zine.

Although the intervening years have seen a steady stream of DAM-related activities and artifacts, 2011 saw a significant increase, culminating in a small retrospective at the Prism Gallery, in West Hollywood, accompanied by a lavish catalogue published by the co- curator Dan Nadel’s imprint, PictureBox. The title of the book (and the exhibition), “Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters 1973–1977,” provides a strong hint that the DAM reclamation was largely part of the co-curator Kelley’s ongoing exploration of the recovering, reconstruction, and archiving of lost personal and cultural histories, and as such, it manages to short-circuit or repurpose most of the problematic absurdities inherent in exercises in DIY subcultural nostalgia..."

Read the rest of Punks Out of the Past: Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and Destroy All Monsters here