Friday, February 28, 2014

Found in the Attic Volume 1


It ain't no cansfull of uncirculated 19th century gold coins, but I thought this element from my 1997 solo installation at POST St. Sebastian Tom Sawyer Cathy Mishima Expo 67 was long gone, when I discovered it tucked in a corner of the attic while trying to staunch the flow of brown water onto my book collection and dinner table below... Disc®otu m’, 1997, soft double mirror ball, fabric, stuffing, optional motors, approx 40 X 30 X 24 ins. Me, from the JOAAP book FAILURE!:

"Descending in tandem from the rafters was the gender-corrected biorchid soft kinetic sculpture Disc®otu m’, a sack of mirror-encrusted fabric containing two motorized vibrating wads of material. I’ve always been puzzled by Duchamp scholars insistence that the title of his last painting Tu m' was an abbreviation of the French expression “Tu m'emmerdes” or “you’re shitting on (bugging) me.” As far as I can tell, it’s just a guess – it could be completed with any French verb starting with a vowel. Why not “Tu m’blank” as in “You blank me,” which, rather than sealing the tomb on painting because of some specific affect (irritation, beshitment, boredom), emphasizes (and probably expresses doubt in the validity of) the very hierarchical subject/object binary model of communication (and by extension reality itself) by which it achieves its agency. Disc®otu m’ in addition to presenting a disembodied teabag of Damocles that visually mimics the geometry-bound domes [Fuller geodesics played a central part in the installation's symbology], was intended to expand Duchamp’s contraction, doubling it with mirrors and subjecting it to seizure. Lazarus, Come forth!"
... and plenty more where that came from... 

This is the dude who ATE Michael Rockefeller.


How Occupy is that? It's like some Bataille wet dream.

"Don't you tell this story to any other man or any other village, because this story is only for us. Don't speak. Don't speak and tell the story. I hope you remember it and you must keep this for us. I hope, I hope, this is for you and you only. Don't talk to anyone, forever, to other people or another village. If people question you, don't answer. Don't talk to them, because this story is only for you. If you tell it to them, you'll die. I am afraid you will die. You'll be dead, your people will be dead, if you tell this story. You keep this story in your house, to yourself, I hope, forever. Forever..."

Read Carl Hoffmann's WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER in the current Smithsonan Magazine. Or a boiled-down account of his new evidence in the NY Daily News.

Image: A 1973 photo of war chief Ajam, of the Dani Tribe of New Guinea, who told missionaries he killed U.S. anthropologist Michael Rockefeller in 1961, and was one of the tribesmen who ate parts of his body.

PS: In rereading Hoffmann's article, I just realized Michael Rockefeller died the day I was born.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Josh Aster on LARZ - Download Now!




The most recent (Valentine Slash President Feb 16 2014) episode of Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine is now available for free download or streaming from the KCHUNG Radio archive. I was worried that the first half would be completely unintelligible because I left the stream feeding back into itself, but it turned out OK! And I remembered to take a picture this time, though I forgot to do a higher quality stereo recording of Josh's guitar and kalimba improvs. Oh well, lo-fi rules anyway!



Actually, though, for higher-res versions of recordings by his newest ensemble Voluminous Sparks, check out their Soundcloud page - Josh said he has some solo stuff up there too, but I can't access it yet, so get the show DL and check back for updates.

BREAKING NEWS! Fragonard Cookie Monster Lapdance Update



How could our research team have missed this? So obvious. Hopefully the last revelation.


Monday, February 17, 2014

Mannlicher Carcano - Bosch Butt Music MEGAMIX



An excerpt from the Feb 16, 2014 episode of The Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour (www. mannlichercarcano.blogspot.com) featuring up to 9 simultaneous versions of the music recently transcribed rom the butt of some dude in Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Listen to Amelia & Luke's original here  and wellmanicuredman's choral version here.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Valentine Slash Presidents LARZ featuring Abstract Heartthrob Joshua Aster


Our Valentine Slash Presidents weekend edition of Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine welcomes LA-based abstract painter and experimental musician Joshua Aster, whose reliably powerful and sumptuous new paintings (alongside those by under-recognized idiosyncratic paint genius Spencer Lewis) are on view at Edward Cella Gallery through March 1st.


Josh is a founding member of the post-rock jam band OJO -- whose diverse catalog we'll be dipping into -- and he'll also be performing some live solo acoustic guitar on the show. 


Hopefully Josh won't be all talked out by his and informal exhibition tour and Spenser's walkthrough conversation on Saturday afternoon at 5. But you might want to show up to that as well, just in case.


Joshua Aster and Spencer Lewis in Conversation
Saturday, February 15th, 2014 | 5 pm
Edward Cella Art + Architecture
6018 Wilshire Blvd.,
Los Angeles, CA 90036


Sunday Feb 16th, 12 Noon
www.kchungradio.org


Images: Contentcontainer, Oil on linen, polyester, or canvas/linen over panel 18 x 18 ins; Shifting Gears, Oil on linen 30 x 24 ins; OJO in alphabetical order: Aster, Avitabile, Cole, Medina, Ore-Giron & Youngblood; Avatar, oil on linen, 50 x 42 ins; Thru a Net, Oil on linen 30 x 24 ins; Wistful Thinking, 2014, Oil on linen 78 x 82 ins. All paintings by Joshua Aster 2013, except that last one.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Fragonard Cookie Monster Lapdance



Further research on the Fragonard offered recently at Sotheby's by  Lynda and Stewart Resnick (as reported in William Poundstone's LACMA on Fire blog) reveals that the original title was not "Two Girls on a Bed Playing With Their Dogs" but "Cookie Monster Lapdance" -- until the always-litigious Sesame Street mob demanded a paint-over.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

LAFMS on LARZ on KCHUNG Vol 1


I once again forgot to take a photo during the Less Art Radio Zine session -- but here is a wholly convincing artist's rendition of what it must have looked like, with Rick Potts, Dennis Duck, and Joe Potts - founding members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who joined me for well over an hour of scintillating historical anecdotes and audio rarities. Stream or download the show from the KCHUNG archives here. And stay tuned for further installments of LAFMS on LARZ on KCHUNG.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Where's LaBeouf?


Chinese New Year meant that the L.A. Printed Matter Art Book Fair at the MOCA Geffen Contemporary on Saturday was chaos - it took me 40 minutes to find a parking space, and all my collaborators on rADIO fREE 'pITA3 had to bail... except for Shia LaBeouf, who read his Meta//Modernist Manifesto, thanked his supporters, and apologized again to Daniel Clowes. Did you ever notice that his last name is one letter "shy" of being an anagram for the name of another hero, Beowulf?

If anyone needs to get up to speed on Mr. LaBeouf's trajectory to art world legitimacy, here's a nice precis. We're not sure if anyone got video, but we're hoping to get further documentation of this magical event uploaded ASAP!

While the brainwashed masses were watching the Super Bowel...


Yeah, I'm talking to you. Brainwashed Mass! I came off my shift at the pirate radio station to find the skies of LA in an uncharacteristically cluttered state, and went to the fields of Elysium to document them. You won't believe what happened when I pointed my camera and pressed the button!

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Christian Shredding, Christian Crooning


Christian Cummings shreds Saturday afternoon on the KCHUNG stage at theL.A. Art Book Fair! Awesome as ever. Check out his album SLAVEBATION here:http://www.pleonasmmusic.org/2012/05/christian-cummings.html

I also made a video of the performance, which I will upload when I get tenure. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Here's the review I wrote of the album in the Nov 2012 Artillery Magazine:

"... His latest album of original songs, entitled “Slavebation,” is something of a watershed. Fusing Cummings’ long-standing avant-gardist embrace of primitive casio keyboard sounds with a previously tempered lyrical desperation, the 13 tracks that make up this extraordinary long-player somehow manage to gel in spite of the extreme dislocation at their heart.

Cummings has a gift for melody, but here it is fractured and off-register: repeated preset arpeggios vie with microtonal trumpet solos to conjure a nightmarish easy listening aesthetic, while the vocals generally only manage to clamber on board the tune at the choruses, resulting in what could be plausibly categorized as rap music. I could also see it being entered into evidence at a committal hearing.


Cummings’ song lyrics are classic voice-in-the-wilderness, treading a fine line between channeled revelation and paranoid rant, albeit leavened by considerable doses of humor and literary invention. Consider this passage from the lurchingly swinging “Tickle My Tushy”:
O wikileaks, wikileaks, loose lips sink ships,
Even ships designed to navigate oceans of shit?
Shits that can only flow backward from oceans to sewers, up toilets, through your intestine, out your mouth and onto skewers.
And then from there into the fridge, then the grocery bag, onto the shelf, the butchers knife, and then back to pasture.
Then back into the womb of its mother, to a time before the chain of life was broken.
Using advanced technologies we can trace the evidence backward through time forever, and still never shake the hand of an creator.
Alternating between elegiac despondency, apocalyptic vision, didactic discourse, and guided deprogramming exercises (often in the space of a single lyric), Cummings convincingly positions himself as a nerdish prophet of doom. The revival of cassette networking has a distinct subtext of retreat to a position where subcultural activity still seemed to promise an escape, or at least shelter. Christian Cummings is facing our crazy life head on, in all its bewildering entropy and Gordian knottiness, and in doing so has produced the first great protest album of the 21st century."