O! Cean Seafood!

AKA Chinatown Nights! Oh wait, that's already taken. Been wanting to document this backlit sign for a while, and walking the whippets in Chinatown to beat the heat was the opportunity I needed! This is an album cover waiting to happen - Scotty Vera's Greatest Hits?

Glendale Nights!

Deflated Rubicon and The Circle of Life (depicted by ants, a dying cockroach, and an empty Dentyne Ice packet).

Coming soon - Derek Boshier, Modern Painter

My feature on LA-based English Pop artist Derek Boshier is out in the September issue of Modern Painters magazine - hard to find in LA, but worth searching out. I'll excerpt it here when it actually hits the stands...

"Our spacecraft is coming!"

I must have got the date wrong, or the space brothers gave me the wrong coordinates or something. It doesn't really matter, I guess it's back to school for another semester after all!

(photo by D. Hawkins)

Literal Metaphorical Collapse

I just updated my website with a series of Daniel Hawkins' photos from the closing deconstructive event for my solo show Never Paint Again at Jancar Gallery in the summer of 2011. After being laid flat with a combined attack of viral meningitis and the gout for the duration of the show, I reemerged briefly for a closing event that included a walkthrough/discussion, but was mainly centered around the disconnection of the supports and collapse of the moldy stretcher architecture. We disconnected the secondary supports and left the main one in place while further drinking and discussion occurred, but just as Don Suggs and Linda Stark were passing under the arch (Chapel Perilous!) it started to list
and creak. They got out of the way just as it came crashing down in a heap! I had a gout relapse, and Tom Jancar kindly broke the stretchers down and left them in the street, phoning them in as abandoned trash for the City of Los Angeles' official Collectors.

Beyond So Wrong They're Right Again

What with the discussion during last week's KCHUNG Radio episode of The People as regards "songpoems" and Rodd Keith (pictured above) - not to mention the forthcoming all-new collection edited by Don Bolles and previewed on his recent WFMU appearance with Irwin Chusid, I managed to dig out, OCR scan, and fix up the article I wrote about the topic back in early 2000. This eventually led to the New Now Sounds of Today! CD project, but that's a whole other story...

Sometime in the early nineteen nineties, followers of Dan Clowes's giddy noir-surrealist comic book Eightball may have noticed a small ad on page 16 for something titled Beat of the Traps. The ad was for a compilation of "songpoems," the recordings that result from those little notices in the back of pulpier magazines and comic books—offering to assess the "hit potential" of your lyrics for possible collaboration with professional composers, arrangers, and performers. Of course, virtually none of the songs submitted are ever found to be lacking "hit potential," and for a usually modest investment, the budding Johnny Mercer or Ira Gershwin may receive an actual vinyl pressing or cd of their song, ready for auditioning to Sinatra's people or storming the charts on its own.

Were the aforementioned Eightball reader to send in a few extra bucks, he or she would have received in due time one of the stranger artifacts circulating in the innumerable microcultural currents that defined the period: a compilation LP filled with ditties written by other starstruck songwriters and studded with gems such as Mrs. Louise Nelson's "Convertibles and Headbands," Louise I. Oliver's "Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush," and a truly amazing trio of presidential tributes— "John F. Kennedy Was Called Away," "Richard Nixon," and "Jimmy Carter Says 'Yes.'" The frothing title track to Beat of the Traps is a skronk-laced homage to the history and lore of the glorious drum kit, sung in a manner reminiscent of a crazy person at the bus station.

Compiled by Tom Ardolino of roots-rock band NRBQ (the group that ten years earlier had collectively masterminded the excavation of the Shaggs's Philosophy of the World LP, a masterpiece of earnest wrong-ness in its own right), the sixteen-song sampler proved to be only the tip of a massive and very strangely shaped iceberg...

Read the rest here, on my website...

Walk Like an Egypt-Chien

I got back one of my dead external hard drives (Thanks, Dave Shulman!) and thought I should post some of the gazillion unseen photos from the archives before it dies again. This is my niece Sarah walking like an Egyptian at Disneyland or Universal Citywalk or something. In 2005.

KCHUNG Radio Appearance This Sunday!

The People: Andrew Choate & Doug Harvey
Sunday, August 18 at 3 p.m.
KCHUNG 1630AM Listen Live

Join hosts Ben White and Mathew Timmons Sunday, August 18 at 3.pm. on KCHUNG 1630AM if you’re in or around Chinatown Los Angeles or listen live on the KCHUNG webstream. The People will be taken over this month by Andrew Choate & Doug Harvey: “a battle fer sure.”

Andrew Choate is planning to ask Doug about his Las Vegas novel / multi-media collage from the group show General Projects: A Show for You

they will talk

Doug might ask Andrew about his computer pieces or his book or about performance

they will talk

Andrew will play some recordings of his work and others and ask Doug what he thinks about it

Andrew will probably play an audio collage he made about ten years ago that Doug's work reminded him of and maybe another audio collage Andrew made and possibly a performance track

Andrew may also just play some Pablo Cruise and be happy

While Doug’s head may be stuck in Rio, he will play some stuff and ask Andrew about it

Doug will probably play excerpts of recent radio improvisations by Mannlicher Carcano, recordings of Doug’s band with Marnie Weber and Daniel Hawkins (and sometimes Dani Tull) "F" (formerly Fauxmish and formerly F for Ache), selections from Doug’s web label Redacted Records, the LAFMS new Blorp Cassette that Doug contributed to, and maybe some stuff pertaining to the 'patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Vol 3 book, and possibly the Firesign Theatre, who are the subject of Doug Harvey’s soon to-be-completed Rabble pamphlet.

They will talk back and forth…

ta da!

Written by Mathew Timmons, svengali of Insert Blanc Press

PS: Listen/download the program here.

The One That Got Away

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In Your Eyes, Acrylic on pre-rotted canvas, with train, 2013