Thursday, September 19, 2013

HITS! HITS! HITS!


Home Inspection Trainin School, that is! Come in for free Inoidario! No ApooiTnest equie! Someone needs to design a font based on peeling vinyl. Or has someone already? I love the internet. BTW that domain name appears to be available - go figure!



Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Early Desponder


Three early responses to 9/11- my review of the Shaker Gift Drawings exhibit at The Hammer; Hunt Down & Punish, a Mannlicher Carcano piece recorded within a few days (and debuted September 21st at the Mark Dutcher-curated exhibit-in-a-van "Gas, Grass, or Ass"); and above, Ground One (2001) - a hand wited-out bootleg of Art Spiegelman's 9/11 New Yorker cover limited edition print Ground Zero.




"Last Tuesday when I got up, I was uncharacteristically organized due to the fact that I had to catch a noon plane to Dallas to participate in a roundtable discussion on the influential art schools of Los Angeles. Of course I never made it, and, having cleared my schedule for a couple of days, spent a therapeutic afternoon chopping firewood for the coming nuclear winter. When the smoke cleared, it seemed the Weekly’s Best of L.A. issue had been postponed and my column was back on schedule for today, so I had to find something to write about. It’s hard to come up with anything that doesn’t seem frivolous or disrespectful. A hypothetical précis of the canceled discussion on the influential art schools of Los Angeles? A roundup of the current bout of gallery gewgaws that mark the new L.A. art-world season? It’s hard enough, at the best of times, to make believe that my opinions are more important than anyone else’s. An aesthetic analysis of the World Trade Center destruction as a brilliantly choreographed appropriation of John Carpenter–esque B-movie cliché? No thanks, I can live without the death threats..."

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Welcome Aboard!


Rat Fink on a Record Truck, Sunset Blvd, Echo Park, Sept 2013

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Hey, Same Address!


Not bad for an uncropped shot from a moving car, if I do say so myself! Echo Park Blvd @ Montana.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Guaranteed for the Life of the Bulb





"The Los Angeles Free Music Society had its original heyday back in the 1970s, as much a dada and LSD-inspired piss-take on the high seriousness of experimental music—these were the days when Stockhausen was God—as a shaggy-dog extension of the Zappa/Beefheart/Wildman Fischer axis of dissonance that defined the fringes of “rock” music.

Coalescing around Pasadena’s legendary Poo-Bah record store, the LAFMS jammed, played out, issued cassettes and vinyl (in editions between 20 and 1,000, the average being 200), and published weird mail-art journals from 1974 to 1982, when they fell into a period of dormancy.

This hibernation ended with a bang in 1995 when Gary Todd’s Cortical Foundation/Organ of Corti label issued a staggering 10-disc retrospective box set of LAFMS archival material that was justly lauded by such international tastemakers as Thurston Moore and UK magazine The Wire. The LAFMS were hailed as pioneers of noise music (having allegedly jump-started the Japanese noise scene) and avant-garde deconstructionist turntablism (with the 1977 cassette Dennis Duck Goes Disco), but their collective range extended across the spectrum of experimental sound-making...


The latest and perhaps most unlikely exercise in LAFMS revivalism comes from EoB Books, the hard-copy publishing wing of the oddball online academic journal East of Borneo, shepherded by Tom Lawson and Stacey Allen at CalArts. Since 2010, EoB has offered an interestingly destabilized, populist version of academic scholarship by employing a limited wiki interface to amend art history according to a relatively non-hierarchical model.

With Second Life: Light Bulb 1977–1981, EoB Books pays tribute to a predigital paradigm of non-hierarchical creative networking, the LAFMS’ pay-to-play house organ/artist zine edited by Chip Chapman. Comprising a run of just four issues—the last of which was a double cassette compilation—the original Light Bulb doesn’t exactly offer an overwhelming wealth of material from which to cull an anthology..."

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Pointillist Portfolio Entity


Close encounter with a radiation-drenched canid, observed safely from behind protective shielding. This is not a put-on, people!

Monday, September 2, 2013

Glendale Nights! II


California landscape painting, bitchin' rims, and a massive hexagonal display case filled with cheap stuffed animal toys. It all adds up to a little touch of magic on a hot Glendale Night!

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Kamikaze Recovery


Recovering one of my two dead hard drives made me conscious of how much documentation I haven't got around to putting online, so I've started to dig in. Here's a sampling of the dozens of photos I just posted to my website - about half that I have on hand from Mannlicher CarcanoPlex Mach 01 - the PØST one-night-only Kamikaze show I curated in 2010 - an "expansion of  Mannlicher Carcano's collage-based aesthetic principle to 3 Dimensions, including sound, performance, didactic elements, food and drink, sexy projections, and all manner of art objects." Participants included Lily Simonson, Michael Q. Schmidt, Joshua Aster and Kristin Calabrese, Michael Arata, Eamonn Fox, Walpa D'Mark, Phyllis Green, Daniel Hawkins, Lee Lorenzo Lynch, Laurie Steelink, Brad Spence, Jimmy Chertkow, Aaron Wrinkle, Joe Deutch, Young Summers, and many many more! It was one of my best curatorial experiences ever. 







If any rich people want to pay me to take a year off and start tackling Chain Letter, message me!

Images (some by DougH, some by Michael Gomez-Burton): Joe Deutch performance; Michel Q. Schmidt as Bacchus; install with George Budd, DougH, Young Summers; Lily Simonson's Anne Frank Karaoke; Ross Rudel's Wet Column; Michael Arata's Hot Dog/Drawing Exchange (with Peter Frank! Get it?); Lee Lynch's Tin Man meets Lily Simonson's Anne Frank.