GARY PANTER BLOG

I am almost always hard at work, part-time with long breaks, on a new collection of JIMBO cartoon drawings. For now that means writing and drawing the ten new eight page stories, or chapters, that will make up the next eighty page JIMBO book. Hopefully, it will be a fancy book and comic and art collectors will crave it and want to take it home with them. I hope they do.

But that is still years away. It takes more than a month for me to draw a page or to think one up, even though I burn the midnight oil. Yet, only a moment from here, you can find conversations frozen in cyberspace where crowds of unappreciative people, mostly dudes of indeterminate age or description beyond ‘erudite’, are crowded into some virtual moist pipette complaining about how badly I draw. If only they knew how hard it is for me to draw this crummily and not like Alex Raymond, which comes more naturally to me, they would show a little more love and mercy.

So, in the meanwhile, occasionally, when I finish eight pages, I make spiffy little mini-comics on colorful cardstock and send them to a few friends and sell them for too much money on the site to discourage  people from ordering them, because I can’t make enough money folding and stapling mini-comics to live in New York. And sometimes I don’t bother to put them in my site shop and just give some to my friend Dan Nadel to sell on the PICTUREBOX  site, which just happened. You can see a picture of the dandy new mini-comic at:

http://www.pictureboxinc.com/products/754-jimbo-party-ball

When you Orcs are through fighting, you can clean up this tell, it is a pig sty and a disgrace. Do you hear me? Just look at this mess– skulls and guts everywhere. Do you act like this at home? Pick up those snakes. Put those truncheons in the iron maiden. Don’t look at me like that. STOP THAT! When will you two ever learn? Oh my god, this runnel is destroyed. What were you thinking? I should brain you both. Stop sniveling and stand up straight. Where are your pants???? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? You think that I can afford a new house? I am calling the ENTS to put an end to this mayhem. They can squeeze you out like toothpaste, for all I care. Yes, they will, they will take you away to a nuthatch, the two of you and you can boozle and pummel yourselves  senseless and sleep in a mire. A MIRE! A big fat stinking swill of a mire! I bet you would. I just bet you would. Come here, you wretched maniac. I’m not through with you. Strew those reeds on that bloodlump. Put that ham back in the icehouse. My, my, you REALLY had a time here, didn’t you. You are SO going to regret this. Why do you make me punish you? Orca, put more coal in the BAAL and Orkin, pump the bellows. Put those ingots of lead in the hopper. RIGHT NOW. Because I said so, that’s why. I’m not doing this for my health. Momma momma momma. I am not ready for this. DON’T MAKE THAT FACE AT ME!

The doleful sirens are beginning to wail over on the ziggarat. Feeding time. Time for us to drop our baskets and playthings and head straight over to the manna pit in the clearing. Oh, Xupi is already there. I can see her waving her fronds and dancing bowlegged way down there. She is so beautiful and free. They all are. Milling around throwing flower chains and shouting by the splashing fountains. The laughter  piercing and giddy. Long haired ponies frolic and jig. The muscles in their legs jitter. It makes them seem so very real as they drag their sparkling manes in rainbow traces through the chilly clover. Sniffling and munching, stamping, flipping their extravagant tails back and forth, batting at butterflies, stirring up airbrushed balls of pixie dust. 

The Morlocks are coming out with buckets of carrots and nuts and edible flower stalks and meatballs from Ikea. They are so ugly, with their HUGE buck teeth and snow white chest hair.  RED EYES and  RED NAILS. You would think that they are a million years old, or never go outside, or something, plus, their odor is REALLY BAD, just like rotting flesh. Makes me want to projectile vomit. I wait for them to leave before I start to eat, because I lose my appetite around them, as previously indicated. Who is paying them to feed us? Who’s asking? The food is not bad. We used to get little potatoes and cranberry sauce with the meatballs. Brgyr thinks the Morlocks are eating the potatoes and cranberry sauce, but I never saw it. I don’t think they are. I don’t even want to look at them. 

Zephyr is late for dinner. Where can she be? She must be hungry. Maybe she followed a pretty pack-pony into the gingerbread forest like I told her not to. More for me is the way I look at it. If she is lost forever it is her own stupid fault. She is a ninny. Uh oh, the head MORL is climbing down into the pit. I hope he doesn’t choose me. I have the smallest carbon footprint of all.

It was hard to miss them: two giant reptiles, locked in mortal combat, right outside the cliffside niche that me and the feral woman had found, in a big hurry. I thought we were having a picnic, at first, woven wooden basket, double flapping lids, checkered tablecloth, a loaf of French bread sticking way out and a jiggling bottle of purple vino, oranges and big simple flowers, like on a painted puzzle. THEN, OUTA NOWHERE… Grunt. Shriek. Bash. Crash. Ook. Ook! Splintering logs, Trees shocked into tatters, whole hillsides collapsing, desperate flocks of rhamphorhynchuses exploding out of the under-growth. Getting far away. Pit-falls and spear-lined tiger traps you expect at every turn. You can watch out for them and quicksand and tsetse flies and leeches, if you only keep your eye on the ball. Twenty ton colliding venomous monitors, or chuckawallas, or whatever they are, are really too much. Beyond reasonable expectations. Call off the pic-a-nic. Sound the air-raid siren. All hands on deck. Titanospheric spinning grape-like gnarled bunting texture, too close.  Sure enough, one of the lizards in torque, flipped a smaller bit of itself–a small useless arm, a tail tip, a hind leg spur, whatever, right in here with us for a second flashing sparks off the rocks! The cold blooded monsters continued their thrashing and bawling and subsonic croaks and spit blasts, spewing torrential fountains of personal effluents, splashing and ricochetting, arcing among our hiding boulders. Ewww!!! We quivered and threw ourselves on the ground crying and screaming in frustration and tore our hair and clothes, a little too enthusiastically, apparently, for soon we were there in the cleft of the rock naked as jay-birds. By then, one of the great oafish behemoths was lost to the world and the great bellows of his lungs accordioned less and less as the light also ebbed. At last the fountain of blood sprayed the underside of the canopy rather than rain down. The bloodied ‘victor’ hissed off into the great stewing jungle to nurse it’s wounds among breadfruit and cold water. The stark naked girl gave me a look as she disappeared into the current.  Missed me by that much.

The Los Angeles Free Music Society box set, entitled: THE LOWEST FORM OF MUSIC is not little, nor skimping. This is a real jumbo momma of improvisational free music movement boxes. I am on disc seven out of ten and it has been a pleasure, phrase by phrase, joke by anti-trope, loop by loop, optigon by chipped bitten reed.

In the late Seventies, clues that there was something about to happen appeared in the form of a million or a few photocopied flyers with messy collages and scrawled text–demented invitations to unknown destinations. What would you find there? In LA I saw flyers on poles and music store windows (at first only the Motels and the Dogs) and finally found SLASH magazine one night at  the Cahuenga newstand.  Shortly there was an explosion of flyers and the musical antics they promised. Most of the shows were similarly conceived and chorded– sped up rock and roll, punk rock, but there were also weirder musical happenings mingled with the speed rock and that was VERY interesting as well. There were hundreds of shows. Saw NON clear a room in a bombed out downtown LA construction site. People ran away screaming and laughing. The guitar mounted electric fan gnawing the strings and piped through giant amplifiers was TOO much, but well worth leaving the house.

In that distant century, a decade earlier, even, a lot of people (especially in the sticks) found their way to experimental music by way of the gatefold list on the album FREAK OUT, by the MOTHERS OF INVENTION, released in 1966–a cultural pandemic, that swept the ocean. A list I could never hope to decode but for little parts I recognized or items that I weaseled a way to get in hand. Nowadays the whole list  is broken down for you on wikipedia and I am going through it item by item at last. You are so lucky. That record hipped me to  Stockhausen, Varese, Charles Ives, Stravinsky and Harry Partch for starters. Stuff young people need to find. That especially includes the music and wit of FRANK ZAPPA AND THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION themselves. Especially these twelve albums:

1. Freak Out

2. Absolutely Free

3.Lumpy Gravy

4. Uncle Meat

5.Hot Rats

6. Ruben and the Jets

7. Live at the Filmore

8.We’re Only In It For the Money

9.The Grand Wazoo

10. Weasels Ripped My Flesh

11 Chunga’s Revenge

12. 200 Motels

Digest these and then you can decide if you want more Zappa or not. Ideally you would be buying vinyl. Note the cover art by Cal Schenkel, Neon Park, Marvin Mattleson and Frank Zappa.

The guys in the LAFMS must’ve been guys that followed the leads on that list, guys like me, with the difference that they made lots and lots of music. Inquistive smartie nerds determined to forge their own SONIC WORLD. What a shipwreck and coral reef they created! I can’t explain this box set to you–it is a bunch of young people, back in the 20th century, on separate and converging teams, making experimental music before there were laptops. Before Nurse With Wound. How did they do it? They performed it live on standard, modified and home-made instruments; they dragged their fingers on long loops of mis-threaded recording  tape and mis-tuned radios to make real-time collage; recorded concrete sounds in the studio and field recordings in the field; they twisted the knobs of sine wave and square wave generators. They talked they sang. Then they took that stuff and cut it up and respliced it and filtered and mixed and drug it around the block behind the car and I haven’t heard a bad track yet. The DooDooettes are closing disc seven with impressive human-powered stuff and I am going to go get disc eight right now out of the clear vinyl accordion cd sleeve which remind me of the way records were displayed at VINYL FETISH. If it sucks, I’ll let you know.

Next day. No it was great. Disc eight was by Rick Potts. Delightfully screwy. Disc nine is on now–Tom Recchion rocking the boat with grace and confidence.