GARY PANTER BLOG

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.

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.