Compost-Modernism

"Titled A Trip to the Dump, this was perhaps the shortest excursion ever organized by CLUI – 20 miles east on the freeway to Puente Hills in Whittier, site of the largest active landfill in America. Passengers who had braced themselves for an olfactory-challenging immersion were not disappointed by a brief side visit to the Central L.A. Recycling and Transfer Facility — a somewhat decrepit way station just southeast of downtown, where a constant almond-scented misting did little to inhibit the reek of garbage as it was dumped and plowed and dumped again.

Puente Hills itself is another story. "People say, 'Solid waste management is a dirty business,'" proclaims the County Sanitation District Disposal Site's glossy brochure. "We say, 'Rubbish!'" Carefully designed to be invisible and unsmellable to the neighboring communities, Puente Hills carefully choreographs the constant stream of trucks to sort your asphalt from your appliances, then crushes each day's worth of bona fide trash (13,200 tons to be precise) into football-field-sized "cells" using the 120,000-pound steel-wheeled Bomag compactor. Seven regulatory agencies engage in elaborate monitoring for radiation, ground water safety and habitat protection. The facility uses methane gas leached from the fermenting trash to fuel its fleet of vehicles, and processes recovered wastewater for dust control and maintaining the landfill's indigenous flora camouflage and oak tree nursery. Though we saw numerous breathtaking industrial vistas, we garbage-tourists probably saw more actual trash at the downtown Transfer Facility than in Puente Hills' 400 acres. Until we got inside the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF).

Immaculate and efficient as it is, the landfill will be chock-full by 2013, which is when the trash train to Mesquite kicks in. Central to this vision of the future of solid-waste management is the MRF (pronounced "Murph"), a hangar-sized building where small mountains of refuse are gradually broken down into smaller mountains of desert-bound landfill and recyclable materials. The mixed recyclables are loaded onto conveyor belts to be picked over and sorted by mostly female, nonunion, minimum-wage laborers. This was the hypnotic money shot of CLUI's Trip to the Dump: the layered, ethically queasy view from the elevated spectator's gallery as thousands of white plastic bags or brown cardboard boxes were continuously plucked from their industrial routing mechanism, cascading to the floor into improbably gorgeous sculptural forms. I kept half-expecting Matthew Barney to pop out and do a tap routine; the DIA Foundation definitely needs to get in on this action. If Earthworks has a future, this is it."

Read the rest of 'Wading in The Waste Stream with The Center for Land Use Interpretation' here.

Above, my photo of the mound of white plastic at Puente Hills' Materials Recovery Facility. I also just uploaded my first youtube video of the same pile. Did you know that the hole's only natural enemy is the pile?

Olfactory Olympics

I was recently fortunate enough to attend the Inaugural Fun Nose Work Competition held at spcaLA in Long Beach. Fun Nose Work is "the next urban sport for dogs" and builds on the same techniques used to train bomb and narcotic sniffing canines, using progressively more complex searches for Q-tips scented with birch or anise oil (at least so far). It's amazing to observe another consciousness negotiating an entire sensory realm about which our species has only the faintest inkling. Above, Dieter (AKA Spike) nails the vehicle search.

This is a brand new recreational dog activity that has sprung up in the LA area under the auspices of Fun Nose Work, founded by former K9 police dog trainer Ron Gaunt, spcaLA Director of Behavior and Training Jill Marie O'Brien, and and independent trainer Amy Herot. Above, Ron marvels at Nigel's near-record of 13 seconds in the box search.


All was not fun and games though, as a ravenous chupacabra slunk along the facility perimeter as dusk fell. There were no incidents, however. Nigel finished on the 1st place team and Dieter was on the 2nd. The complete results and more pictures are available on the Fun Nose Work website.

Hole on the Horizon

Here's a more legible version of the poster/bookjacket for the Mel's Hole show, with information on the opening and the location of GCAC. Just click on the image to see a larger version.The artists-in-residence Cathy Ward and Eric Wright, have arrived and started accumulating material for their Hole work.


Cathy Ward & Eric Wright "Nevada 1846" 2005 oil on canvas.

888 Fireworks 888

Fireworks performed another impressively extemporaneous set this last Friday at High Energy Constructs, ably supported by The Bushes, Falcon Eddy, and Wounded Lion. A digital recording was made, but the device was set for the lowest-quality "dictation" mode, and the results are reminiscent of a poor-quality cassette bootleg from the 70s. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - Wounded Lion comes through particularly well. We'll look into sharing the roughest version of "Carol Cloud" ever. In the meantime, here's Firework's radical new arrangement of their classic "Grammar School Teacher" made even more abstract by the unplanned lo-tech processing.

Not in Ellensburg Anymore

Here's the first glimpse of the catalog for my upcoming curatorial extravaganza 'Aspects of Mel's Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace' opening Sept 6th at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. It's an elaborate folding dustjacket for the hardcover tome, and doubles as the poster for the show. It was designed by Wendy Peng.

Those needing a refresher as regards the Big Story should listen to this.

Review Catchup 2: Peter Saul Not at MOCA or MOMA

"Saul’s penchant for the blasphemous, sexually explicit, ultraviolent needling of authority figures pretty much accounts for why this is only his third solo survey show in America. Over the past couple of decades, he has vented a good portion of his spleen on art-world icons: a self-portrait taking a shit in Duchamp’s iconic urinal, innumerable piss-takes on 19th-century history paintings, and — most ill-advisedly — a series of uncommissioned portraits of prominent art critics. These began with Minimalism cheerleader Barbara Rose in 1963 and culminated with the transgendered, self-penetrating (with a paintbrush!) Clemunteena Gweenburg (1971) — though the artist continues to poke occasional cruel fun at this most misunderstood, embattled and unappreciated segment of the art world (Oh! Do me! Do me!).


No examples from this particular series of broadsides made it into the current retrospective at the Fashion Island–adjacent OC Museum of Art, though there are always plenty of digs at art stars like De Kooning and Picasso — Saul even takes on Francis Bacon and Duchamp in a single painting. Ironically, it was these kinds of satirical half-homages that initiated Saul’s rehabilitation in the mid-’80s, and they are the works for which he remains best known.


Which is the single most melon-twisting aspect of this act of institutional redemption, since Saul has always been, for me, one of the two or three best painters of the original group of artists labeled Pop in the very early 1960s, when his work (with its jumble of consumer goods rendered in exquisite but skeptical recovered naiveté) looked like a mash-up of De Kooning, Dubuffet and Richard Hamilton. While Warhol was arguably more economical in charting the trajectory of painting’s eventual (if not ultimate) disappearance up its own arsehole, in the end he was better at drawing lines than he was painting. Lichtenstein and Rosenquist? Fuggedaboudit. Good painters with great shticks ... and timing. Saul’s painterly peers in the early Pop era were crackpot Europeans like Öyvind Fahlström, Sigmar Polke (pronounced pokey) and Gerhard Richter (pronounced Gumby), and L.A. transplants Hockney and Kitaj. All of whom went on to blue-chip currency. Except for Fahlström, who shared Saul’s inability to refrain from direct commentary on America’s habit of global imperialism. Mere coincidence? Perhaps ..."

Read the rest of 'Th-th-that's Saul, Folks!: Peter Saul's Painterly Cartoon Armageddon' here and see the show at OCMA through Sept 21



Peter Saul (descending a blogspace): "Bush at Abu Ghraib" (2006); "Art Critics' Suicide" (1996) [not included in exhibit]; "Vietnam" (1966); "Icebox Number 7" (1963)

Review Catchup 1: Rauschenberg Not at the Huntington

Above: Leroy Grannis, Hermosa Beach Strand (1967)

"I’ve been thinking a lot about Rauschenberg lately. But I’ve always thought a lot about Rauschenberg. For my money (I wish!), he was and remains the unsurpassed master of visual language in the modern era; his seemingly effortless improvisational command of semiotics was exceeded only by the richness, intricacy and originality of his formalist skills. Treating information as material, he translated Dadaist collage into the idiom of painting; painting into sculpture; then flattened the whole menagerie into a dense and simultaneous info-pancake of silk-screened magazine clippings that stripped pictorialism and narrative linearity down to their bare wires.

If that weren’t enough, he was a dyslexic homosexual drunkard —all top-shelf people in my chest of drawers. Rauschenberg was Ernie to Jasper Johns’ Bert — expansive, self-indulgent, mischievous and visionary. And while Johns’ academy-friendly visual vocabulary is more finely tuned, Rauschenberg was in a state of continuous eruption, spewing forth a torrent of picto-glossolalia that offered a new way to look at the world. Looking at the world was, in fact, Rauschenberg’s specialty. The first artworks he sold to a public collection were a pair of photographs Edward Steichen bought for MOMA in 1952 — years before Rauschenberg’s paintings were taken seriously. He always took brilliant photographs, and his own self-appropriated snapshots came to dominate his image morgue.

Rauschenberg’s photography was central to his practice though not particularly lauded within the field. Nevertheless, lately, it’s seemed to me that his pop-alchemical formalist legacy is more evident in the work of contemporary documentary photographers than among painters (or performance artists, for that matter — printmakers and designers more so). Maybe it’s just my personal fixation on Rauschenberg’s epiphany, but he seems to me to be the absent hub at the center of the Huntington’s This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs — a surprising outburst of world-class curatorial practice from an institution whose arcane tweediness has always been one of its main attractions."

Read the rest of 'Polterzeitgeist: Bob Rauschenberg Haunts The Huntington' here.

Meet the Beatless

Guess I'll be pounding the skins or something. Only drummer left in the city who won't be at the tarpits. More posts shortly.

Waterloo/Sunset's Fine (Art)

As promised, I have dug out the backup camera to document the most interesting painting I've seen in a while, certainly the best street art I've seen in ages. And, as you can see from this supplementary photo, it's got wheels, for the au go-go lifestyle of the new homeless middle class! And you can't beat the price. Now that I've made it famous, it can be collected from the corner of Waterloo and Sunset, where the Higher Path burned down.

The Final Belch Ignited

Today is the last day for The Black Dragon Society, the gallery that jump-started LA's Chinatown art scene 10 years ago. Founding artists Roger Herman and Hubert Schmalix (with "silent partner" Chris Sievernich - producer of Wim Wenders' 'Paris, Texas' and John Houston's 'The Dead') oversaw BDS' transformation from a funky and intermittently open DIY party space to a jet-set hub in the international artworld youthquake of the 00s, enabled by gallery director Parker Jones (who is opening his own eponymous space with a reshuffled BDS stable). For some reason, Roger invited me to put something in the show, so I included the above Pre-Rotted ® "painting" entitled 'Hanky Code.' The wake is scheduled for the gallery's normal 11 - 6 but I'd be surprised if it didn't run a little overtime.

Believe Me Baloney

I don't think I've ever watched an entire episode of the X-Files, but Gillian Anderson was great in 'The Last King of Scotland' and you gotta love Duchovny as the tranny FBI agent in 'Twin Peaks' and as the serial killer hipster fetishist who learns his lesson but good in 'Kalifornia.' Rounding out this admirable CV, the pair recently posed together in front of the missus' portrait of Soviet muttnik Strelka while offering their pithy insights into the mysteries of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Truly these are the End Times.

Blocked by Blogger's Spam Protection Robots No More!

Whew! Merely quoting the spam below triggered the overzealous spambots of my host organism, preventing me from posting. Apparently they have some kind of prejudice against "irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text." Also, my digital camera stopped working just as I was about to photograph an amazing spray-painted ottoman on Sunset Blvd. In lieu of that (I'll try and get an image of it over the weekend) here is my entry in the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition: It is entitled Erik Knutzen: Thought Stylist.

I had to see how this looked...

And share this urgent message from the FBI Foreign Remittance Telegraphic Dept regarding a large bank transfer in my name from C.B.N Bank Nigeria District:

Secret Diplomatic Payments Are Not Made Unless The Funds Are Related To Terrorist Activities Why Must Your Payment Be Made In Secret
Transfer, If Your Transaction Is Legitimate, If You Are Not A Terrorist, Then Why Did You Not Receive The Money Directly Into Your Account, This Is A Pure
Coded ,Means Of Payment?

If this thing works out, I may not be writing any more art criticism for a while!

Addendum: Well, that large bank transfer should be coming through at any moment, but in the meantime the recent discovery of orientation irregularities in the Roden portion of this visual complex (see addendum to previous blog entry below) compels me to reconfigure it - here is a new version, edited to show the overlapping areas only (can anyone say "LP cover!"?):

displaced lowercase solar invocation

From a GLOW press release: Late Saturday afternoon, the Glow team got a first indication that attendance might be greater than anticipated when response time on the City of Santa Monica's website slowed down to about 15 minutes - undoubtedly due to the huge internet response. The unanticipated, tremendous draw resulted in a few mid-course adjustments early Sunday morning. When a new wave of Glow seekers arrived after 2:00 am, the Santa Monica Pier finally reached capacity. Public safety officials then limited access to the Pier for a period of time, the music stage was closed, and the popular work by Usman Haque north of the Pier was briefly shut down.

The "music stage" was curated by dublab and SASSAS and steve roden was the pre-empted headliner, scheduled to play the sun up with his loopy steel guitar. He went home and did it in his garage, and posted an mp3 of the sweet, haunting recording (along with his account of the melee) on his blog.

Above: Pulp paperback (under plastic) from the collection of Jim Shaw

PS: steve's typically spectacular show of paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and film/video/audio/plastercaster installations is up at Suzanne Vielmetter in Culver City through August 2. Along with the quantum leap in scale, the most remarkable new development is a series of humumental works on paper including "quartet 1":



Addendum: I should have noticed this, but the Vielmetter webmeister got the orientation of this piece wrong, so here is the correct rotation:

Eelin' with the Feelin'

Can it really be more than a decade since my humble self-published comic book inflicted the questionably heroic Captain Eel-Begone upon an unsuspecting world? For those who missed the very limited run of the above-pictured rarity, the main story has just been reprinted in 'Blurred Vision 4,' a yearly anthology out of NYC that showcases comics by people from the fine art and literary worlds. Just in time to cleanse the Dark Knight-saturated palates of the Comicon set. Available wherever quirky comics are sold or at the Blurred Books website.

PS: Please note the trademarked character of Quagmire appearing a full 7 years before that of Seth "spared by 9/11 to continue his important work for mankind" MacFarlane.

China Syndrome II: The Unravelling

I probably should have posted this while the show was still up, but you can get an idea at the Steve Turner Contemporary website and get a fuller picture of China's oeuvre over at ACE.

“It started with this idea that I had when I was in debt from all this health stuff [a bout with anemia], and just always scrounging for money, and never getting out of this small space. And then this thought I’ve always had about advertising: how so much of what people buy is an idea about what is going to happen when, like, ‘If I get the right gown and if I ever go to Cancun, this’ll look fabulous!’ And I wondered, could I create this whole thing all from right here? I do the pictures here, do the whole composites here, I print it here, the clothes are all made here. So it’s like this complete imagined exotic journey that all takes place in my apartment.”


This ad absurdum DIY philosophy will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Adams’ oeuvre. At 30-something, she boasts an unusually long string of solo exhibits — due to the fact that her first was at age 23, while she was still attending UCLA as an undergraduate. Her pivotal work was a classic in what might be called stripped-down performative design — the kind of event that derives a wealth of conceptual significance and emotional impact from a slight shift of the spatial relationship between 2- or 3-D objects. (Think Chris Burden’s arm and a copper-jacket .22 long-rifle bullet or Jeffrey Vallance’s relocation of Blinky the Friendly Hen from supermarket display to pet cemetery.)


In Adams’ Official Cannibal Status (1993), the object in question was a tiny chunk of human flesh donated by a fellow student, which Adams — a vegetarian since childhood — displaced into her digestive tract in front of witnesses, then documented with a framed, notarized affidavit, triggering one of our species’ deepest taboos with a clinical and bureaucratic dispassion bridling with Kafkaesque irony. The elegant formal economy of Adams’ gesture notwithstanding, it was the work’s unrepentant theatricality, outrageous humor and narrative conceit that made it remarkable in the dry context of conceptualist-art practice. It doesn’t get much juicier than raw meat...

Read the rest here.

Above:
Flights of Fancy, 2008, Installation Shot (Steve Turner Contemporary)
Ms. American Woman: The Winners Circle, 1998, Photograph, Pumps, Vitrine & Notarized Certificate (ACE Gallery)
Official Cannibal Status, 1993 (Detail), Ink on Paper (ACE Gallery)

Moe Diddley

Sorry for the no posts, the last thing I want to do in my spare time is sit at the computer. I've been sorting out my art archives, scraping off the rat shit and putting everything in strict chronological order. Pictures to follow. In the meantime, Bo Diddley died. Velvets drummer Moe Tucker recorded his signature tune several times, including this version from her OOP solo debut DIY masterpiece Playin Possum. "I saw him live for the first time in '63 when he was with Jerome and all those guys," recalled Moe in a PSF interview "In person, it was just stunning. One of my things was that I vowed to record "Bo Diddley" every time I went to the studio. Then Kostek reared his ugly head and said 'when you record for a label, part of the contract is that you won't record those songs for X years.' So, I couldn't really record that again for the next one and that really pissed me off. I really wanted to do that one on EVERY record. And if I ever got it right, I'd stop. (laughs)"


Another great interview I found, while sniffing around the web as regards Eduardo Paolozzi is this three-way - on the occasion of his disastrous 1971 Tate retrospective - between Eduardo, J.G. Ballard and Frank Whitford (author of The Ultimate 3-D Pop-up Art Book and a swell LAT rant about Derrida as well as Paolozzi's Guardian obit, the catalog for his disastrous 1971 Tate retrospective, and an extensive if raggedly transcribed online interview.) Ballard, in high CRASH mode, observes "Although our central nervous systems have been handed to us on a plate by millions of years of evolution, have been trained to respond to violence at the level of finger-tip and nerve-ending, in fact now our only experience of violence is in the head, in terms of our imagination, the last place where we were designed to deal with violence. We have absolutely no biological training to deal with violence in imaginative terms. And our whole inherited expertise for dealing with violence, our central nervous systems, our musculature, our senses, our ability to run fast or to react quickly, our reflexes, all that inherited expertise is never used." Ballard goes on to describe his legendary April 1970 exhibit of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab in London. The above photo shows Paolozzi (on the occasion of his disastrous 1971 Tate retrospective) and Ballard immediately above the arm of Euphoria Bliss.


All of which is my roundabout way of suggesting you check out Brian Bress' new video for Wounded Lion's Pony People on youtube, then, if you're in the neighborhood, go to their FREE live performance at the Echo on Monday (July 7). They go on around 10:30 is what I heard.

Peers Bears Disappear

Found Yuppie in Bear

Saturday's your last chance to see mi esposa MA's show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica. If you need a fix of preparatory space dog oil sketches, uncommisioned corporate portraiture, giant generic purebred dogs rendered on found upholstery, yuppies "dressed in bobtailed-bear-cub plushy suits, climbing stairs into something resembling the aurora borealis as painted by Helen Frankenthaler," or the likeness of Ahmed Chalabi's cousin captured with a single line of ink, get on down!


Salem Chalabi, Co–founder Iraqi international Law Group


Lost Yuppie
All works by M.A. Peers 2008

Mother Load Tonight

Tonight (Saturday May 31) Lee Lynch of the Coalition for Cinematic Conservation and Preservation - Southern California Chapter will be presenting the feature length opera film "The Mother Load" with the filmmaker Peter Yates. This is a surreally beautiful and funny lo-fi cinema treasure, with a haunting musical score. Yates is best known as half of the avant-garde Elgart-Yates Guitar Duo and has previously composed an opera based on the lives and works of folk artists Simon Rodia and "Grandma" Tressa Prisbrey.

Lee says: The story is based on historical events of a hard-rock mining town in Nevada City and told through the manipulation of various black and white xeroxed historical photo collage puppets, I quote the artist verbatim: "Part of a series of works using new media to empower the individual artist, it follows to the nth degree a do-it-yourself, low-budget aesthetic, with text, music, voices, instrumental performances, recording, sets, puppetry, masks, camera, and editing done almost entirely by the lonely filmmaker. Simple arithmetic dictates that, compared with this $2,000 work, a 100-million-dollar Hollywood film will provide 50,000 times as much life-changing content and aesthetic satisfaction."

8pm, 5 bucks at the Echo Park Film Center, 1200 North. Alvarado st (at Sunset Blvd)

Kaprow! Kaprow! Buddhabuddhabuddha!

Above: Happeners in the Mist: Steve Roden and his intrepid troupe recreate Kaprow's '18 Happenings in 6 Parts' at LACE in late April. Photo by Sari Roden (I think).

"Forging a unified field theory out of his seemingly disparate Hans Hoffman apprenticeship, American Povera assemblages and participation in the formative social nexus of the Fluxus movement — John Cage’s legendary late-’50s class in music composition at the New School for Social Research — Allen Kaprow operated as the postmodern missing link, personifying the historically bowdlerized continuity between Abstract Expressionist painting and the farthest reaches of the subsequent avant-garde, leaving behind not only recognizable imagery but the very notion of a tangible art object.

Taking to its logical extremes critic Harold Rosenberg’s seminal “painting as an arena of action” concept (where the term Action Painting came from), Kaprow systematically expanded and refined the “arena” to include virtually all intimate human social phenomena, while recognizing the subjective experiences of the actual physical participants — mere memories — as the most meaningful leftovers of the creative process.

Along the path, though, Kaprow left behind a wealth of more-substantial and potential-soaked evidence — including paintings, assemblages, environments, photo/video/audio records of performances, scripts for his trademark Happenings and later relational art, as well as correspondence and a goodly amount of incisive critical writing. Otherwise he would never have been able to have a museum retrospective such as the German-initiated “Allan Kaprow: Art as Life” tribute now on view at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary."

Read the rest of '"This is really happening: The Branding of Allan Kaprow: Anti-Warhol, Anti-Star' in the Weekly, and go see the show, up thru Jun 30


"Oh yeah, beatnick ladies lick that jam off the hood of my car! That's CONCEPTUAL, Baby!" - A. Kaprow (attributed)

TV or Not TV

Above: Brian Bress wearing Hundley-flage ® homages Munch's Skrik in 'Undercover'

"The high humor quotient is the key. Taking their cue from Bruce Nauman’s absurdist exercise videos (his 1968 'Walk With Contrapposto', an hourlong art-historical sashay back and forth in a narrow plywood corridor, is among the earliest works in the show), California artists as diverse as Chris Burden, John Baldessari, Paul McCarthy, Eleanor Antin, The Kipper Kids and Tony Oursler permitted themselves to risk appearing foolish, embedding their often-profound philosophical observations in documentations of comedy-tinged performances.

This legacy continues today, with works like Martin Kersels’ genderific slapstick remake of Fred Astaire’s dancing-on-the-ceiling routine, 'Pink Constellation' (2001) and 'Undercover', L.A. Weekly Annual Biennial alum Brian Bress’ heady 2007 conflation of painting, collage, performance and the vernaculars of cable access and infomercials. To my knowledge, Bress is the only artist in the show who shares his oeuvre via YouTube (as well as his own Web site, www.brianbress.com), which brings us back to our clotted-irony elephant, which has put on a couple of tons in the light of the digital frontier.

If the underlying point of video art was to create a more democratic, nonhierarchical, parallel model for the production and dissemination of information in the form of moving images, well, digital camcorders, Final Cut and the interweb done whupped video art’s ass. (Also conspicuous in its absence, especially considering the inclusion of such nonartsy material like the S.F. punk archives of Target Video, is the wealth of material generated over the past quarter century via the soon-to-be-shit-canned public-access cable stations. Where the hell is Francine Dancer?) We are right now in the midst of a radical renegotiation of the nature of authorship and the very concept of “intellectual property,” on which most professional artists stake their livelihood. But you wouldn’t know it from this show..."

Read the rest in the LA Weekly, and see the Getty's California Video show in person (thru Jun 8) or online.

By the way, Nigel's fine...

His biopsy was negative, his stitches are out. His nosework prowess is progressing in leaps and bounds. Here he is at that Huntington dog beach, shaking the seawater out of his ears. Mark Dutcher and David Ross' waterlogged "Miniature Australian Shepherd" Arbus & an unidentified other dog in background.

Weird Scenes Inside the Moonlight Rollerway Jubilee

While braver souls were wandering the 110 degree wilderness of Santa Fe Springs or Norwalk or wherever the hell REN, a new performance by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, was unfolding, I was obliged to honor a previous commitment by attending the air-conditioned nightmare known as the Moonlight Rollerway Jubilee. Did I say nightmare? Wet dream is more like it, with lamé clad master of ceremonies Charles Phoenix doing his William-Conrad-frying-the-Turing-Test showbiz glossolalia to an audience that seemed to be 90% roller community regulars - a community as insular as dog show competitors and comic book geeks.


Phoenix's informative and entertaining "slide" presentation was surreally compelling, with a couple hundred audience members seated in a grid of folding chairs on the rink floor hypnotized by vintage images of roller derby queens and weddings on wheels as our host intoned his concentrated camp commentary to a warm but slightly puzzled reception.


The following hour and a half was a revelation, though. The heck with Matthew Barney. The heck with "Day is Done." Today's cutting edge performance art is being created by the Junior and Senior "In Sync" crews and their Gold Skate Classic champion cohorts. Their knowing vernacular references - a tribute to "Roller Boogie", "Xanadu", and Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Starlight Express" closed the night with a BANG! - were sincere, and informed with a deep kinaesthetic authority.


We were actually bumped from the floor by overbooking roller rink jubilee profiteers, but wound up with prime box seats in the concession area - toward which much of the choreography seemed directed, and through which the performers had to come and go between the green room and the arena. All in all a spectacular Pop-mythological triumph. One-word hint though: Solarbabies. Nuff said.

Exhibit A: Boo-boo; Tootsie Roll

It's Nigel's butt! Ha ha ha! As if we needed more stress, while we were installing M.A.'s show last Weds, Nigel sprouted a thumb-sized lump on his upper chest. By Thursday it was as big as an egg, so we called Doc Martin and Nige was in and out of surgery 4 hours later, one mystery lump (biopsy pending) lighter.


The incision is healing nicely into a macho scar, but is slightly garish in the meantime, so we dug out Reyna's old bandana and Nigel got a new nickname.

The Dark Past of Glenn Bray

Bray has several peculiar claims to pop-culture fame — his rediscovery and patronage of Basil Wolverton in the early ’70s initiated a revival of interest in the artist’s work and a flurry of high-profile gigs. Bray brought forth into the world the entirely new genre of Wrestling Music by recording and releasing Fred Blassie’s 1976 Pencil Neck Geek single, which became one of the iconic records of Outsider Music after Dr. Demento put it into heavy rotation. Bray also sought out Carl Barks, the then-still-anonymous Uncle Scrooge comics auteur, and convinced him to get Disney’s permission to create an oil painting based on one of his classic cover illustrations. One painting, 'A Tall Ship and a Star To Steer Her By' (1971), begat hundreds — and a welcome income stream in Bark’s later years.

Read the rest in the PEOPLE issue of LA WEEKLY

Above: Barks painting 'A Tall Ship and a Star To Steer Her By'

The Dark Past of Josh White

The son of Willie Nelson’s longtime road manager Vernon, White’s first job at the tender age of 12 was as a guitar roadie and substance gopher to Kris Kristofferson’s tour band. Over the next four years, he traveled across America and Europe on Kris’ bus, hanging with heavyweights like Nelson, Kurt Vonnegut, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. “It didn’t faze me,” recalls the spry, ex–punk rocker. “I was into Black Flag.”
Read the rest in the PEOPLE issue of LA WEEKLY