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!

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..."

Read the rest of Tis the Gift to be Simple here

Welcome Aboard!

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

Hey, Same Address!

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

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..."

Read the rest of WRITING NOISE: Chronicling the Chaos of DIY Media here, or pick up the hard copy in the September 2013 issue of artillery magazine.

Order a copy of Second Life: Light Bulb 1977–1981 here.

Pointillist Portfolio Entity

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

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!

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.

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

Dear Ms. Simonson

We know you're very busy at your professional activities and it's sometimes easy to overlook the small responsibilities. That's why we're sending you this friendly reminder that your payment of $2.50 is now in arrears. To forestall legal action that could affect your credit rating, please send your payment today!

Thank you for your cooperation
The Mgt

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

Still Here

Here is a tiny praying mantis on our front porch. More soon - 8 AM summer art history class, dead external hard drives, and other factors have muffled my e-voice. But not much longer!

Pork Chop on a Stick!

Happy Bastille Day!

A Partial Pre-Rotted Alphabet

A for the Aeroplane that flies far away

B for Ball for children at play

D for Dolly in ribbons and silk

Not that I don't agree with the sentiments, but...

Some righteous young street artists saw fit to grace our front retaining wall with this incendiary proclamation last night. Why they would feel it's appropriate to deploy this provocation to law-enforcement officials on the obvious slacker artist household on a street of overweening industry yuppies instead of, oh, I don't know, the closed-down Rampart Police Station about 4 blocks south of here is anyone's guess. It must be part and parcel with the strategy of spraying it in a location -- behind a parked car, a pile of bulky items (one perfectly good headboard, one not-so-healthy couch), two yard waste containers, and a giant poison shrub --that no cop would ever see unless he or she were actually physically walking down the street. I guess if they ran out of gas and were trying to make it to PK's Donuts... I painted it out anyway.

Those Red Blotches Just Won't Go Away!

CACI International Inc is a multinational professional services and information technology company headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, United States. I think this is a still from Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, but I'm not sure.

Solstice Yard Waste in Search of a Match

After a decade of neglect, the fabricated legalese of our psychotic neighbor - a midwestern cross-dresser whose drag persona is based on Mary Tyler Moore - persuaded the Landlord to send his house trombonist to trim the overgrown Bougainvillea spilling over from Ms. Moore's yard (s/he suffers from Boundary Confusion Disorder). We were left with several temporary (I hope!) environmental sculptural forms, two of which I present for your consideration. I'm tempted to spark one up and commence to leaping, but the whole goddam shithouse would probably take. No great loss, but there's books and records in there!

Some TVs (Part 1)

Downey? I don't even remember.

Nigel bundled in the minivan. It was that Rally-Obedience Annual Thing. What was it? Look at that foot! Paw I mean. Heading home after dark I think. Hence the flash and the faux-Chloe eye.

Abstract Men's Room Mural

BRUUUUUUCE!

Exclusive preview of Bruce Lee bronze statue about to be unveiled in Chinatown. Here, Bruce seems to be saying "It's been a bad day; please don't take your picture!" in his charming patois. Visitors to LA's historic tourist destination will now have an opportunity to commemorate their adventure with a souvenir photo. But be sure to stay behind the  little white fence and "Please Keep Off the Statue"! This has been a DougH on the Go! Exclusive!