GARY PANTER BLOG

Twenty five years ago I lived in Los angeles. During the decade that I lived there, Melrose developed as a street with interesting stuff. Billy Shire opened Soap Plant,Wacko and La Luz De Jesus Gallery and was nice enough to buy and show my work. Billy  gave my father and me a painting show at La Luz many years ago while he was still on Melrose. Gai Gherardi and friends at LA Eyeworks let me show my paintings when they opened their first restaurant, City Cafe, on Melrose. Steve’s House of Fine Art –SHOFA and Vinyl Fetish abutted Melrose on Larchmont.

Last week we made new friends and met old friends at Chris Gere and Katie Vonderheide’s store front art and music space.  Devin Flynn and me were in town for our art opening at SCION and it worked out that Ross Goldstein and his better half Trish were thinking of driving to LA from New York for fun. DEVIN GARY & ROSS is the band I’m in for the last four years and we found ourselves all in LA at the same time.

Devin’s steady girl Jane  set up a show for her to perform solo, as SPIDER, and us as DEVIN GARY & ROSS and her friends HUMAN SACRIFICE  at SYCHRONICITY SPACE on Melrose. Once we started thinking of a show in LA we thought of our pal Rick Potts of the LAFMS and Dinosaurs With Horns as someone fun to perform with again and also someone crazy enough to loan us stuff and rehearse with us at his and Krystine Krytre’s pad in Pasadena and drive around all night returning equipment after working all day at AMOEBA. 

I haven’t mentioned that we were reconoitering and milling about Devin’s Folks Ed and Vivian and brother Ian’s cool pad in Atwater near a killer taco stand. You don’t have to read this–I am just telling you what happened.  I am not walking down the street typing this as it happens. This happened last week.

We arrived early, naturally, to set up our gear and do a sound check. There we met Chris and Katie, handsome and beautiful, and willing to let us try our thing out in their room.

In performance, SPIDER was winsome and melodic and kind of in the great Donovan’s company, which is very pretty indeed. HUMAN SACRIFICE (not the Christian death metal band by the same name) were a beautiful couple of nice hairy singers and guitar, autoharp and electronic players and I really liked what they did. It was warm and human and real and risky even.

DEVIN GARY & ROSS came on last to a room of enthusiastic friends and strangers and, with Rick Potts help, we churgled into a swampy cosmo improv oil slink interrupted by occasional semi-recognizable  melodies and angelic harmonies and finally by a BALLS TO THE WALL ( what the heck does that mean?) rave out and exit stage left. We said good night and drove way the heck somewhere behind downtown to a mysterious labyrinthine art complex in an old brewery, called the Brewery and returned equipment with Rick.

Devin, Gary, Ross, Jane and Trish  said good night at IN AND OUT BURGER and I wended my way back to Malibu to Mr G’s house, to cop a few hours of sleep only to greet the dawn in LAX car rental return bus and eventually onto a Delta flight back stuffed tightly between  a nice lady who didn’t say anything and a nice lady reading a book entitled PRAYERS TO THWART DEMONIC POSSESSION and one named WINNERS IN THE BATTLE AGAINST DEMONIC POSSESSION. 

Take off was delayed an hour because of a hydraulic leak (good– please fix it) and then a stupefying return to the gate after a passenger demanded to get off the plane. All the luggage had to be removed in case the hysterical lady was trying something tricky tricky tricky tricky tricky, if you know what I mean. I think the lady next to me inconveniently riled a demon in her that had to get off the plane and away from the prayerist’s effective invocations. These vampire killers and their inconsiderate ways!

Had fun in LA. with Bob Zoell and Devin Flynn and many pals at our art show. Roger Gastman and his friends at SCION INSTALLATION LA in Culver City were great to work with and nice people. The show is up at 3521 Helms Ave. No sign. Go in. Up for three weeks, so scoot. It looks neat. Devin’s animated films are being projected in multiple in the back of the space  and his big bounding drawings of cartoon mayhem and mutation lead visitors into the center of the gallery where co-plinths elevate one really big painted cardboard sculpture of an LA gang dude and a companion little bitty gangster who stars in Devin’s  cartoon series “Ya’ll So Stupid”. There is a lot of my work in the show that came by way of Billy Shire and PCC.  I drew a big chalk drawing on a black wall 35 x 12 feet or so–a free association frenzy, which will be painted over at show’s end. Forever. Check it out if you are in the neighborhood..

OK. There are only two BOB ZOELL paintings in the show. Yet, BOB ZOELL’s paintings are really powerful. They are subtly cartoony formalist masterpieces that can teach you what art in space means if you will hang around them for  a few minutes.  Go see these things before they disappear from sight. Stare at the giant yellow and black one for thirty seconds and your eyeballs will be popping out of your head– a wonderful experience.

BOB ZOELL has been one of my favorite artists since I was in high school and saw his work in Esquire and EARTH. He was a famous illustrator who was doing stranger and stranger and beautifully designed illustrations built from the conventions of 1930s animation. I have known him since the eighties and consider him some kind of genius. Please go to bobzoell.com and check out his work. He has not revealed everything there is to know about BOB, there, but it is a cool tippy-toe into the iceberg size output of BOB ZOELL. When you get there, don’t forget to contemplate what the picture of the locomotive means. It means he built a functioning locomotive or two from scratch. OUT OF METAL. Even hot rodders might balk at such a daunting program. If you are an ANGELINO you have probably inhabited his tiled subway station. LA should give him a medal. GO BOB GO! GO DEV GO!! GO ROGER GO!!! YOU GO GIRL!!!!

We would tie orange and black stuffed fake fur cat-tail spirit sticks to the back of our Mustangs, Roadrunners, Cameros, Corvettes, GTOs, Barracudas,Ford Galaxie 500s, Malibus,  Plymouth Furies, Belvederes, El Caminos, Fiat Spyder coups, Falcons, John Deere tractors, etc and peel donuts in the Piggly Wiggly or Brookshires parking lot, then smoke the cheater slicks all the way to the Quicky mart to buy the new issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Then, we might caravan out to Century Lake to look for the ghost of poor lost Johnny Heron. “MOW!” the football team will bark as they burst through a billowing Wildcat painting done by the cheerleaders in blue and gold tempera paint on giant butcher paper. Right after the spectacular Blue Blazes drill team exit the field in their tipped cowboy hats, mini-skirts and white go go boots, there is a commotion in the stands–beloved  Abe Dial is taken away in an ambulance with an ulcerated stomach–been secretly sipping whisky in the band bleachers. The tubas and drums thrum support. Brows furrowed, Mr W takes his glasses off, looks at his clipboard and puts his glasses back on. The red flashing light dims out of the stadium. We know Abe will be back and we will win the game and have a rainbow snowcone by that giant pile of gravel between the railroad tracks and the girl’s softball field. Maybe later we will watch a cloud of a million bugs swirl in the yellow street light as the mosquito sprayer goes by the duck pond.

In a week I am going to Los Angeles  to do a big wall drawing as part of a three person show at the Scion Space in Culver City and, while in LA, the band I am in, Devin Gary & Ross, is going to play on Melrose. We are excited about the art show and the musical event. Hope to see you there.

The painting show is here:
Scion presents: ZPFfffft!!!
A group exhibition with Bob Zoell, Gary Panter and Devin Flynn
June 19 – July 10, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 19, 2010 | 7-10pm

Scion Installation L.A.
3521 Helms Ave (at National)
Culver City, CA. 90232
Gallery Phone: 310.815.8840
Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM & by appointment

Devin Gary & Ross musical show is here:
http://synchronicityonmelrose.blogspot.com/
under June 22nd on the Synchronicity site calendar.

Yogi Bear, Wally Gator and Tennessee Tuxedo and That Walrus that hangs out with Tennessee are on this big raft going through the jungle. Creepers, shoots, lianas and flowering tubers erupt and pustulate all round the frolicsome group as they roll downstream around elbows in the tributary and whitewater features replete with jumping packs of piranha chattering their choppers and flashing mirror-like scales. Smoke swirls around the volcano.

Yogi looks first at Wally, then to Tennessee, then to Atom Ant who he didn’t know was on the boat until this moment and says to no one in particular, but not the walrus whom he disdains for no reason he can put his finger on, maybe a simple lack of formal introduction never enacted by the hatted penguin, “Hey, Boo Boo, do you hear something?”

Atom Ant looks up brightly and shouts in a shrill ant-like voice “I’ll fly up above the forest canopy and check it out!!!” He flies straight up out of sight and never looks back.

Wally Gator looks down after a spell with a baffled expression on his log-like puss and says to Yogi in a voice that sounds like Daws Butler imitating Phil Silvers or maybe Bert Lahr, “Yeah, Yogi, now that you mention it, I hear some kind of consonant, unceasing, dull, roar. Do you hear anything Tennessee? Chumley?”

“Why Wally, Chumley hasn’t heard so much as a peep since you fired off that magazine earlier, trying to shoot a mosquito off his head. Isn’t that right, Chumley?”

Chumley says, “I can’t hear what the hell you guys are talking about, but the river falls out of sight ahead”

Everyone on the raft blinks as a man and gulps. By now Atom Ant has struck gold in China.