Lompoc Report Part 1

Nigel's triumphant Rally-O debut. He scored a 95. He has his first leg.

"I'm Garfield... Fly Me!"

I've been agitating for this Sunset gutter find as a contender for the CCCP-SCC's backyard cinema research seminar, but I'm afraid to actually check it out. I'm guessing its some kind of low end virtual reality simulation; mildly S/m interactive porn for middle-aged female fans of Garfield. And not that pretentious hi-falutin Bill Murray version of Garfield either. I initially read G's airline pilot getup as a Gestapo uniform, but that would certainly be in poor taste. Science compels me to retire to my laboratory with some Jergens and Kleenex to make a thorough assessment before proceeding...

I Hwil Choose Free Hwil

"Everyone else gets a preview of their work, so I thought I should get a preview of my work. I'm so sick and tired of everyone else getting everything they want and me being ignored and hated by people who don't even know me, just like in high school. But maybe this blog will change everything, and I can get on the A-Team again, like I was when I wrote for LA Weekly! Then I'll know that people really really LIKE me!"

Here's a sample of my latest soundwork... I've been feverishly abridging the audiobook version of Wil Weaton's autobiography for the one-night-only HOLODECK show curated by Brad Eberhard as one of PØST's Kamikaze shows this Thursday, July... well, maybe we should just let the press release explain it...
The HOLODECK
PØST
Thursday, July 26th
7-9PM

The Holodeck is a simulated reality facility on the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D, the primary setting of the American science-fiction television series Star Trek the Next Generation. The characters on the show use the Holodeck for a variety of applications, including recreation, training, and problem solving. Although crew members can program in the environment or scenario they wish to inhabit, they cannot necessarily control their experience once inside. Things go wrong with it pretty regularly. People get stuck inside and can’t get out. Like art, the Holodeck is an ideal world in which refreshment and conflict go hand in hand.

The HOLODECK is a group show whose participants were each given a card from a deck of Star Trek the Next Generation playing cards as a prompt for an artwork. Each person was presented with the option to select a card with a specific character/theme or to receive a card randomly from the deck. The breakdown was about 50/50, specific vs. random. They could use the their card as a source, an object, or the starting point for any manner of conceptual strategy that suited them. The show will include a variety of 2, 3, and 4 dimensional media.

Some participants identified themselves as fans of the show, while others have barely seen it. Regardless, in producing a work for the exhibit, all have approached and interacted with the substantial, multiple–faced icon that is Star Trek the Next Generation. When the work is considered all together, the sly cross-fades with the sincere, creating a curious harmonic dissonance, humming with possibility.

Enter the HOLODECK.

Explore new worlds.

Engage.

Etc.

with:

100xbtr, Jonathan Apgar, Joshua Aster, Theodora Allen, Lara Bank, Leon Benn, Nora Berman, Elonda Billera, Lucy Blagg, Brian Bress, Kristin Calabrese, Joshua Callaghan, Scott Marvel Cassidy, Jimmy Chertkow, Brian Cooper, Sean Duffy, Brad Eberhard, Josh Erkman, Tyler Finnie, galería perdida, Wendell Gladstone, Zach Harris, Asher Hartman, Doug Harvey, Roger Herman, Katie Herzog, Carmine Iannaccone, Matt Johnson, Raffi Kalenderian, Michael John Kelly, Becky Kolsrund, Cyril Kuhn, Julie Lequin, Susan Logoreci, Alan Ludwig, Ashley Macomber, Dana Maiden, Susanna Maing, Amy Maloof, Antonio Puleo, Kelly Sears, Tif Sigfrids, Brad Spence, Rob Thom, Justin Veach, Matt Wardell, Christine Wertheim, Jonas Wood, Rosha Yamghai, Bari Zipperstein

organized by Brad Eberhard

PØST
1904 East Seventh Place
Los Angeles, California 90021
Tel: 213-488-1280
E-Mail: new@post-la.com

Everybody's Fancy

Going through a box of potential Less Art content, I came across this 8-track signed to me by Mr. Rogers while he was getting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I couldn't get close enough, but my late paparazzi friend Terry Lilly managed to break through.

Here's a piece I wrote about Mr. Rogers for Art issues. back in the late 90s...

"The very same people who are wet sometimes
are the very same people who are dry sometimes"
from ‘Sometimes People Are Good’

When I told my 11 year old nephew Andrew on the phone that I was writing an article about Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, he responded with a fairly devastating parody of Mister’s trademark low-key microscopic view of the mundane “..and look! There’s bubbles of air coming out of the fishes’ mouths! Let’s look closer, boys and girls...Isn’t it wonderful?” Andrew then suddenly shed the affectation of adult cynicism, conceding with a hint of nostalgic enthusiasm that the neighborhood of Make-Believe segments had been at least worth viewing, then finished by sharing the inside scoop that Mr. Rogers ‘is gay’ and ‘owned the Pittsburgh Penguins for a year’,

Such complex responses to Mr. Rogers’ deceptively simple oeuvre are not atypical. I first became aware of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood through a number of memorable parodies, particularly Eddie Murphy’s on Saturday Night Live. Subsequently, I began noticing a strange quality to the occasional soft news items about Mr. Rogers, such as the one in which he advocated the expression of unconditional love in settling labor disputes at his family’s tool and die company in Pittsburgh, cast regular Betty Aberlin’s laughing response to a tabloid’s attempt to dig up some behind the scenes dirt: “In real life Fred Rogers is exactly the person you see on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood”. Soon I began watching the show regularly, and, after an initial period of harsh skeptical scrutiny, became addicted to the slyly insinuative anarchistic surrealism of, yes, the Neighborhood of Make Believe segments.

These portions, the central, conspicuously Fredless focus of each program, take place in a simultaneous parallel reality accessed by a shamanic trolley-ride through a tunnel to a neighborhood populated by a polymorphous array of animal puppets and live humans, of human puppets and live humans in animal costumes, of animal puppets in human costume, living in castles, trees, clocks, factories, jungles, and museum-go-rounds; in short, a shifting and centerless array of intermimetic archetypal identities and loci put in the service of whatever that week’s ostensible topic of discussion (When Parents Go Away, Monsters and Dinosaurs, etc.) might be, but always seeming to wind up reiterating that any thought or feeling is permitted expression in the realm of the imagination.

Right from the start, we have to observe that the two-to-five-year-olds at whom the program is directed are attempting to consolidate somewhat less baroque material than might spring to the mind of your fully acculturated adult. Thus, some of Mister Rogers’ injunctions and definitions trigger a battery of exceptions and reservations- I, for instance, have never felt that the policemen are there to help me- that might suggest the presence of an exclusionary, judgmental hierarchy. The Neighborhood of Make Believe is, after all, a monarchy. But this impression is wrong. As King Friday XIII himself has stated, “In this neighborhood everyone can decide for themselves what is best.” and Mr. Rogers’ aim is clearly to arm his viewers with a full and intimate knowledge of the status quo, and the powers with which to -oh so peacefully- overthrow it.

For while he never has the denizens of Make Believe act out any of the most transgressive impulses that wrack the pre-genital psyche, he allows all manner of equally disordinate slippages to occur, from the gleeful and elaborate cruelties of Lady Elaine Fairchild to improbable alliances such as the marriage of an aging human ‘drinking straw salesman’ to a talking starfish in order to provide grandparents (the straw salesman being the biologically related but previously absentee party) to a sad tiger. Such convoluted shapeshifting reaches its textual apex repeatedly in the recurring ‘opera’ events staged by the Make Believists, generally to some cathartic and laudably therapeutic end, but invariably a self justifying phansasmagoria of consensual permission in itself...

Read the rest of Zen and the Art of Make-Believe: A Date with Mister Rogers here.

Proof Positive

People didn't believe me when I listed "Jar-Jar Binks All Cotton Toddler Girls' Panties" as a medium in my artworks, but recent archival excavations unearthed the above pictured artifact. Who's laughing now? More discoveries to follow.

Ciao Bella

Between his sobs, I found out from Lee Lynch that the totally awesome Chumbawumba had announced they were disbanding a couple of weeks ago. If you only know of the band from their hit "Tubthumping" (whisky drink, fall down, get up, etc.), read Aaron Lake Smith's brief history, though I have to take exception to his assessment of their later work as " acoustic lite-techno" - I would characterize it as a valiant attempt to revitalize the British folk-rock tradition. Here's a couple of samples - their (re)recording of the 17th-century "Diggers' Song" (late period) and their scathing rarity "Passenger List For Doomed Flight 1721" (middle post-punk electronic disco period) which is also available as a free legal download from the band's website. Poor Bono!

Haut Bon!

Google translate says:
"At any Honour to whom honor: The Murder of Hi Good by the Ameri-cain Lee Lynch. Inspired by a Real occurred in California in 1870, The film shows the murder brutal the last hunter-In dians, Hiram Good by a blood- mixed. The two men are described as similar in "El Etnografo" by Argentinian Ulises Rosell. DR film, one living in humiliation tion and fear, the other in the glo- laughing his conviction Superiori- ty. Until one day, Ned, the half- Indian alarmed, took a rifle to see what that does to empty its cartridges in the body of a White assumed invulnerable. Inspired by reading the ethno- logue Robert F. Heizer, shot with non-professional actors the ranch that belonged to Hi Good in the town of Vina, co-authored with young Indian activists of the region, the film is a kind of Western chimeric a grotesque cruelty, evoking simultaneously Land Without Bread (1933) One of Luis Buñuel and adventure Billy the Kid (1971) by Luc Moullet. The evolution of the genus is com- crushed me (classic Western, westerncritique, documentethno- graph) and all formats Registration exhausted (from 35 the super-8 via the tele- phoneportable). Lee Lynch explain that this heterogeneity on a little monster: "The principle collage I cared. I wanted use all possible forms gender and technology for finally say that none of they were apt to redeem the atrocity of this story. It fau- drait to reconfigure any this mythology. "It does this in its modest scale. Born here thirty-two years to near the scene of his film, in northern California, from from a modest background, Lee Lynch prospects of political history plastic in its region and Cineas- you: "Between the conquest of the West and the hippie movement, the California is mired in the myth. The iniqui- ty and social racism prevailing in that State are systematically mentsous évalués.Mêmela-against- Culture continues in its own way, the Indian genocide. "But his films, dontcertains cosignésavecla Reali- satrice Lee Anne Schmitt, no hole- Wind not the way the rooms. The Murder of Hi Good has been my- strated in a gallery, in the form installation. For him, the question ing Indian remains taboo: "What do you think of a State which osebaptiser named "Geroni- mo "the operation to elimi- NER bin Laden, without the presi- dent Obama can prove himself in satisfactorily with the Indian community? "

Better Late Than Never

Hot off the presses, Jessica Rath's review of ARATALAND!

"To say that Michael Arata is prolific is almost laughable. “Arataland!,” a retrospective of this Los Angeles-based artist, recently filled more than 20 rooms in the three-story Beacon Arts Building. Walking through hundreds of works, one could imagine that Arata has spent every night of his life furiously cranking work out, most often using sculpture as a way to insert himself into an existing political, religious, and art historical dialogue and interrupt our assumptions about it. Curated by artist and critic Doug Harvey, “Arataland!” was deftly organized into three floors: “It’s Complicatedland,” “Innocenceland,” and “Negativespaceland,” thus providing convenient theme parks in which our minds could play..."

See the entire review in the print version of July/August's (2012) Sculpture magazine.

I Made You This Mixtape

More Ventura Summerfest Snaps

Pems for Brad

Between writing about the Quetzalcoatl show and finalizing the 'patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Vol 3 I've also been deeply immersed in abridging the audiobook of Wil Wheaton's autobiography for Brad Eberhard's Holodeck curatorial project - a one-night-only Kamikaze show at PØST on Thursday July 26th based on a deck of Star Trek- The Next Generation playing cards (I drew the Wesley Crusher 6 of clubs). I nevertheless managed to get up to Ventura for 2 out of 3 days of the Summerfest All Breed Dog Show, where I was able to document some remarkable folk art pertaining to Brad's breed of choice (if I recall correctly he has one Pembroke and one Cardigan), which I now post here for his, and your edification. Thank you.

Chain Letter One Year Later

I've just started uploading some of the documentation from last year's Chain Letter shows to my website - I'll post a link when its more fleshed out. But in the meantime, Sofia Leiby just published this thoughtful piece about CL and several other "Horizontally-Structured Megaexhibition" at the WOW HUH blog.

"Three recent exhibitions that included more than 400 artists and embraced an “open invitation” model — Chain Letter at Shoshana Wayne gallery in LA in 2011, the fourth annual Brucennial in March of this year, and Hennessy Youngman’s Itsa small, small world at Family Business in April — represent a shift in curatorial posturing for both artists and institutions, a first step towards initiating a destabilizing of both value systems and hierarchy in the art world. Each organizer used utopic, idealistic diction, populist rhetoric, paid lip service to Occupy Wall Street and social media, and most often denied their roles as “curator”, preferring “instigator” or “organizer.”

In his article “Club Kids: The Social Life of Artists on Facebook,” for DIS magazine, Brad Troemel remarks on the consumerist value relationships attributed to artists’ work that is exhibited in group shows with intangibly numerous artists: the exhibitions irreparably suture the artists’ identity to his or her name, work, and community, both AFK and on the internet — further objectifying the artist into a brand. “Group exhibitions are the punctuation to an ongoing social media conversation […] promotions materialize into their names being shown side by side one another, categorized by a curator and legitimated by a gallery.”1 Troemel’s verbiage – “materialize” – nods to physical exhibitions, but also to language. “Both are ways of making literal otherwise loose social ties exemplified through text’s silent populism. The image –both of gallery installations and social life– operates in a liminal space between projected conception and firmly believed reality. While artists have always consorted in packs, the process of distinguishing and joining such groupings has never been so formalized as it is today through Facebook.” These massive, “open-invitation” exhibitions can be seen as a literalization of this “liminal space” created via social networks."

Read the rest of Soft Populism & Pop Democracy in the Age of Crowd Sourcing: Investigating Hierarchy in Horizontally-Structured Megaexhibitions here

By Popular Demand

DougH on the Go! reader Anak wonders "So adorable!!! Did the puppy, at any point, just stand underneath Nigel?" This is the only such shot I got, and you can see why it didn't make the first cut! Completely out of focus!

Puppy Fix #0371: Badger & Nigel

I went out to Chloe's exclusive NW3 class in Altadena for the first time last week, and apart from observing some bitchin' nosework, I got to meet 2 new puppies. So did Nigel - here are some glimpses of his first close encounter with Badger, son of Gogo the Bull Terrier. Body language speaks volumes, followed by some sort of mystical shamanistic union. The camera doesn't lie!

Next up, Blaze, the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever!

Vintage Garabedian & How I Spent My Summer Vacation

I've been falling behind in my postings here, mainly because of my summer vacation in the Land of Viral Meningitis and Goutville - the latter precipitated by the use of large quantities of Pepto Bismol to stem the gastro-intestinal tide unleashed by the former, without reading the fine print. Which of course says "Don't use if you have the gout." So I haven't been getting out much, and a large part of my time at home was taken up with sleep. Not that I don't have plenty of old news to catch up on, but what typing energy I've been able to muster has had to go to final grading and a cluster of deadlines that could not wait - including a couple of pieces for the ambitious magazine ArtVoices which recently expanded from New Orleans to L.A.

The September issue will contain a feature on the Institute for Figuring and their recently opened permanent space in the same Chinatown digs where High Energy Constructs used to manifest, plus a review of Don Suggs current show (through June 30) at LA Louver. (Dig this weird unposed snapshot above of the research materials I was using while writing the pieces - Margaret Wertheim's Physics on the Fringe and the catalog for Don Suggs: One Man Group Show, lying adjacent. Now tell me there's no God! And He isn't a giant olive hovering in the desert!)

Speaking of ArtVoices, the issue containing my first contribution - a review of Charles Garabedian, also at LA Louver (I know, but its the only way I ever get to the beach!) - should be hitting the streets right about now. It's already online, and it goes something like this...

"For anyone who missed his stellar retrospective at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art last year, Charles Garabedian’s recent “Works from 1966–1976” at L.A. Louver offered a glimpse at the most pivotal moment in the evolution of perhaps the most underrated of contemporary West Coast painters. Garabedian (who will turn 90 next year) got a late start, graduating with a master’s degree in painting from UCLA close to the age of 40 before staking out a portion of the LA artscape alongside friends like Robert Irwin and Ed Moses.

His big break didn’t come for another decade, until Marcia Tucker included him in the 1975 Whitney Biennial and the landmark “Bad Paintings” show in 1978, when his deliberately awkward figuration was identified as a precursor to the then-burgeoning neo-expressionist movement. Yet, as with many of the artists associated with that art historical moment, his work has outlived the usefulness of such a pigeonhole through its longevity and sheer idiosyncrasy.

Some of Garabedian’s most idiosyncratic experiments come from the pre-recognition decade covered by this exhibit. Daytime T.V. (1966) inserts a large image of a television screen (featuring a scene of ambiguously erotic violence — under what appears to be a collaged ceramic tortilla/sun) into an urban landscape, marginalizing the actual cityscape into a decorative border. The low camera angle interior shot Restaurant (The Waitress) (1966) shares a similar pulp sensibility, as well as Daytime T.V.’s weird-ass medium: a grungy craft paint called “flo-paque” — the somewhat limited aesthetic possibilities of which Garabedian made a perversely extended exploration during this period..."

Read the rest of Charles Garabedian: Works from 1966 -1976 here.

Images: Miraculous synchronicity in book design documented by DH; Don Suggs Omphalos 2012, archival inkjet print on Crane Museo Max paper; Charles Garabedian Daytime T.V. 1966, flopaque and plaster on board; Henry Inn No. 3 1975 acrylic on canvas; Restaurant (The Waitress) 1966, flo-paque on board

Val Kilmer's Mark Twain and Dave Fenster's Pincus

“What is Val Kilmer thinking?” This question could be taken as one of the central motifs of the 52-year-old actor’s career (as epitomized by his 2004 stage portrayal of Moses in The Ten Commandments – The Musical and the WTF-fest Island of Dr. Moreau) and perhaps an explanation for why so many artists of my acquaintance have an unusual interest – not to say obsession – with his work. Recently, I had the opportunity to plunge into that speculative quagmire by attending one of Kilmer’s performances of Citizen Twain – the one-man workshop play about Mark Twain he writes, directs and stars in – in its two-week run in the Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The merch table even offered marble headstones engraved with Twain quotes!

That in itself – with the added perversity of the fact that Hal Holbrook has made the one-man Twain schtick his theatrical stock-in-trade for half a century – would have been enough to pique anyone’s interest, but the backstory pushes this movie star’s venture into community theater territory over the top. Kilmer, a lifelong follower of Christian Science, decided to workshop this portrayal of America’s first modern celebrity as research for Mark Twain & Mary Baker Eddy: A Love Story – a film he’s been working on since at least 2007, when his people uploaded a trailer to youtube.

There’s also a website (twaineddyfilm.com), which reveals the sincerity – and Eddy-centric nature of the project. Eddy was the founder of Christian Science, most famous for eschewing conventional medical treatment in favor of healing through prayer. She and Twain never met, but he published a scathing attack on her and her church in 1907, during a period when his always-iffy Presbyterian faith gave way to the almost-mystically solipsistic atheism of his final novel, The Mysterious Stranger.

Val’s people asked that I “not review his performance”, which is too bad (if anyone wants proof of Kilmer’s undiminished chops, check out the little-known 2008 mini-series of Comanche Moon). The only disappointing aspect of the production for me was the lack of emphasis on Eddy, robbing Citizen Twain of the narrative and philosophical twist that could most emphatically distinguish it from Holbrook’s legacy. It may be a bid to court investors by avoiding the appearance of proselytizing, but Kilmer’s bias is evident from the outset, endowing Twain’s ghost with a posthumous verification of the reality of Deity and a tempered - even reversed – assessment of Eddy’s lifework. My advice to Val is forget the executive producers, and amp up the WTF quotient. As far as I know, you only live once!

Director David Fenster’s new film also addresses alternative medical practices - not to mention the interdependence of humor and despair that lay at the heart of Twain’s great American voice. Fenster’s previous feature Trona (2004) was described by critic Scott Foundas as “an evocation of the desolate road poetry remembered from the best films of Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch” and screened at MOMA.

Although not technically a member of the Small Form films collective that produced Mike Ott’s celebrated indie film LiTTLEROCK (2010 – now available on DVD, Blu-ray, and netflix streaming from Kino Lormer), Fenster was associated with the group at CalArts, and – like Trona – his new film Pincus features a remarkably assured lead performance by Small Form renaissance dude Dave Nordstrom, whose own writer/director/actor feature trifecta Sawdust City (2011) is still making the festival rounds.

Nordstrom plays the title character, Pincus Finster, an incompetent and/or indifferent building contractor in over his head trying to take over the business his father abandoned after succumbing to Parkinson’s. The father, Paul Finster, is played by the director’s father Paul Fenster, who has lived with Parkinson’s for the past 13 years -which only partly accounts for his unaffected naturalistic performance.

Joining a yoga class to pick up chicks, Pincus begins to explore new age treatments – partly in hopes of helping his Dad, and partly as a manifestation of his own bumbling spiritual yearning. As his contracting business unravels, he allows his one employee – a homeless German drunk – to move into a tent on his father’s property, but after a couple of days Dietmar (the late Dietman Franosch) vanishes, shifting Pincus’ search into a more pragmatic mode. Or so it seems.

Beautifully shot by Fenster, and mimimally but exquisitely scored by John Wood, the deadpan episodic storyline thrums with a formalist glow that imbues Pincus’ low-key existential bewilderment with a sense of impending revelation – a promise fulfilled by one of the most satisfyingly anti-climactic dénouements ever filmed, which manages to veer Fenster’s improvisational autobiographical naturalism towards a magic realism worthy of Vittorio de Sica’s Miracle in Milan. Now that’s WTF!

Pincus premiered at the 2012 LA Film Fest, June 14 -24 (www.lafilmfest.com).

PINCUS (2012)
A film by David Fenster. Starring David Nordstrom, Paul Fenster, Christi Idavoy, and Dietmar Franosch. Directed and Written by David Fenster. Executive Producer Phil Lord. Director of Photography David Fenster. Edited by David Fenster. Music by John Wood. Total running time: 78 mins.

Click here to see a clip on youtube.

Never Paint Again Again

These are the last couple of days to check out my solo show Never Paint Again at Jancar Gallery. The main piece, a 16-foot tall site-specific dream-inspired sculptural architectural intervention, will never be seen again. Saturday's the last day, and I'll be doing a semiformal Artist's Deconstruction starting around 3.

J A N C A R G A L L E R Y
961 CHUNG KING ROAD
LOS ANGELES, CA 90012
TEL 213 625-2522
Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 12 – 5 PM (and by appointment)
www.jancargallery.com

Artist's Deconstruction Saturday June 16, 3 PM (semiformal)

"Pincus" World Premiere this Saturday

Director David Fenster's new film Pincus is set to have its premiere at the LA Film Fest this weekend, and I recently reviewed it (alongside Val Kilmer's one man show as Mark Twain) for Artillery Magazine (offline but now here). Fenster's previous feature Trona (2004) was described by critic Scott Foundas as "an evocation of the desolate road poetry remembered from the best films of Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch" and screened at MoMA.

Although not technically a member of the Small Form films collective that produced Mike Ott's celebrated indie film LiTTLEROCK (2010 & now available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Netflix streaming from Kino Lormer), Fenster was associated with the group at CalArts, and—like Trona—his new film Pincus features a remarkably assured lead performance by Small Form renaissance dude Dave Nordstrom, whose own writer/director/actor feature trifecta Sawdust City (2011) is still making the festival rounds.

Nordstrom plays the title character, Pincus Finster, an incompetent and/or indifferent building contractor in over his head trying to take over the business his father abandoned after succumbing to Parkinson's. The father, Paul Finster, is played by the director's father Paul Fenster, who has lived with Parkinson's for the past 13 years—which only partly accounts for his unaffected naturalistic performance.


Joining a yoga class to pick up chicks, Pincus begins to explore New Age treatments—partly in hopes of helping his dad, and partly as a manifestation of his own bumbling spiritual yearning. As his contracting business unravels, he allows his one employee—a homeless German drunk—to move into a tent on his father's property, but after a couple of days Dietmar (the late Dietmar Franosch) vanishes, shifting Pincus' search into a more pragmatic mode. Or so it seems.

Beautifully shot by Fenster, and minimally but exquisitely scored by John Wood, the deadpan episodic storyline thrums with a formalist glow that imbues Pincus' low-key existential bewilderment with a sense of impending revelation—a promise fulfilled by one of the most satisfyingly anti-climactic denouements ever filmed, which manages to veer Fenster's improvisational autobiographical naturalism toward a magic realism worthy of Vittorio de Sica's Miracle in Milan. Now that's WTF!



PINCUS
A film by David Fenster. Starring David Nordstrom, Paul Fenster, Christi Idavoy, and Dietmar Franosch. Directed and Written by David Fenster. Executive Producer Phil Lord. Director of Photography David Fenster. Edited by David Fenster. Music by John Wood. Total running time: 78 mins.

Click here to see a clip on youtube.

Los Angeles Film Festival Screenings:
Saturday, June 16th at 8:10pm - Regal Cinemas L.A. LIVE - Premiere
Thursday, June 21st at 7:40pm - Regal Cinemas L.A. LIVE - Public Screening

Click here to purchase tickets.

www.pincus-movie.com

Self Diagnosis of the Month: Viral Meningitis

Now I just have to figure out if it was triggered by polio or hoof & mouth disease...

Four concurrent shows and counting...

If you can't get enough of that Doug Harvey feeling, I am now going to have one or two new pieces in a show of slightly kinky work from Winnipeg-associated artistes (including Phyllis Green, Guy Maddin, and many more), at Antebellum Gallery in Hollywood (1643 N. Las Palmas Ave 90028 to be precise), which claims to be "the only fetish art gallery in America, and perhaps the world" - which kind of clashes with my understanding of most art collectors' motivations, but hey, semantics. Now there's a fetish!



The show opens next Saturday, June 2nd, from 6 - 9 and features a live performance by the inimitable Glen Meadmore.
Along with my solo show at Jancar Never Paint Again, my piece in Lineamenta at Beacon Arts, and The Patter of Tiny Brains kids audio curatorial at 323 Projects --- oh wait a minute, that's supposed to be over tomorrow. Better call right away! (323) 843-4652. Counting is tricky!

Michael Q. Schmidt at "Never Paint Again" Opening

The inimitable Michael Q. Schmidt graced the opening of my Jancar Gallery solo show Never Paint Again with his supposedly pay-per-pose pousse-pousse photo op although seeing as I only got $15 out of the deal, I'm thinking a lot of you people still owe me. How did you think you were going to get away with it? I have the photos, for godsake! Thanks to Robert Zargoski (seen in third from last photo). See if you can spot the director of Rugrats in Paris!

I'm going to try and join the above pair (MQS and John "Mr. Let's Paint TV" Kilduff at Pehrspace in Echo Park on Monday June 18th. Be there or stuff.