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ISSUE 02 Navigation Winter 2014

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01. JUSTIN FISET: WLA pg. 06 02. RACHEL WOLFE: ESPLA pg. 13 03. TRACY, CALIFORNIA pg. 20 04. THE BRONZE AGE: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER ALEXANDER pg. 30 05. ARJUNA NEUMAN: A VILLAGE OF OUR OWN pg. 46 06. JOEL DEAN: THE MUTANT + THE MELODY pg. 55 07. CREATIVE UNDERGROUND LOS ANGELES pg. 60 08. FOLLOWING SOUND 02 pg. 66 09. DERDE VERDE: AN INTERVIEW pg. 70 10. IN RESIDENCE AT THE ECHO: AN INTERVIEW WITH LIZ GARO pg. 75 11. STREET DOGS pg. 82 12. DEPRESSION (ERA) FOOD pg. 89 13. LOS ANGELES CRAFT BREW QUEENS pg. 94

01 . J U ST IN

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BY CASEY WINKLEMAN Armed with an impulse to shoot without a preference for subject matter, Justin Fiset manifests the harmonious alley portraits that bisect the thoroughfares of West LA. He discovers these raw places by simply wandering. The alleys, Fiset describes, are liminal spaces– a word with origins in anthropology first used to define rites of passage in varying cultures. These alleyways are indeed spaces of transition. Their presence often evades us. Losing their place within the equivocal expanse of West Los Angeles, with highway systems demanding attention, they are then brought to life again by those who veer off the map into lesser known territories. If Fiset’s photographic series, WLA, shorthand for West Los Angeles, are studies comparable to rites of passage then the subjects at hand are what he refers to as “residues.” Mildewed carpets slump on the concrete bathed in beautiful Los Angeles light. Light and lines intersect with the corners of discarded nightstands. A stream of urine pools from a lamppost onto the ground. Singled-out and highlighted in lush Los Angeles illumination, the subjects of these photographs are never bodies themselves, but the presence of people emanate from them. These residues serve as testaments to the aftermath of over-materialism and speak to the catharsis of letting go our useless excess.

Justin Fiset

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Justin Fiset

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Justin Fiset

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02. RA CH EL

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FE : ESP L A L O W BY CASEY WINKLEMAN “I would see things and say of course this is here, but it’s here because it’s especially in LA!” Sometimes one has to invent new words to describe previously unknown feelings. Rachel Wolfe documented the hyper-presence of the spaces in ESPLA–bringing the residual feeling of the places and carrying with it the cultural gestures, subtle aesthetics of Eastern influence, and the breadth of distinctions that exist in these subtle iconographic visual plays in constructed physical space. These are not just studies of Asian-influenced ornaments that dot the strip malls and hidden alcoves throughout West LA–somewhere in their formal harmonies these images become a celebratory exclamation on the city’s visual vibrancy. Lively in nature, representations of ancient floral motifs meld into the modern infrastructural public life as if they had been there all along, somehow manifesting themselves all at the same time. Astute in their own individual ways of seeing, both projects take on a life deeply embedded in the notion of a kind of internal rebirth. When creating many of these photographs, Wolfe and Fiset were orienting themselves by making sense of place via Los Angeles’ idiosyncratic light.

Justin Fiset

Rachel Wolfe

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Rachel Wolfe

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Rachel Wolfe

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Rachel Wolfe

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03. TRA CY ,

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L IF A C

ORNIA

BY TRACY JEANNE ROSENTHAL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR There is no outside of feeling. Feeling produces our submerged, hallucinatory being in the world. It is that prism that colors our experience with a precise and pervasive hue— we see red, we are blue. At the same time, feelings are interpretive. We understand our feelings in reaction to experience; they seem to happen to us, to emerge from our very circumstances and take us under their thrall. Feeling troubles the distinction between the subjective and objective. It does the iridescent work of mediating the divide. Rather than abandon us in solipsism, feeling’s double-life is its essential link to conceiving of collective experience. Feelings make interior psychology contingent on social context. Any effort to conjoin aesthetics and politics occasions, with parallel difficulty, thinking about feeling. Affect theorists offer us “structures of feeling,” as if giving architecture to clouds would convince us of their weight. Perhaps “structure” is meant to calm the surge of associations that “feeling” often ordains: irrational, chaotic, nostalgic, narcissistic, romantic, (certainly) feminine. More importantly, “structure” hails to feeling’s capacity to organize: information, bodies, space, time. This project uses feeling as an organizational strategy. As with any other principle, some things won’t fit the sieve. In July of this year I went on a research adventure with a five person collective in a teal school bus. We visited Tucson, Phoenix, Marfa, Houston, New Orleans, Memphis, Hot Springs, Newkirk, Oklahoma City, Tucumcari, Santa Fe, Flagstaff, Las Vegas, Yosemite, and Oakland. We made two exhibitions. We left and returned to LA. How to document this group experience is a question of ethics as much as form. How to meet the demands of ethnography and art. How to fray the stability of a “we”—as if a collective could have a single mind, let alone a heart.

Tracy, California

Enclosed, you won’t find a transcript of our hours of discussing Freire, the creative class, what to cook for dinner. I won’t offer you materials lists, schedules, or maps. I have no pretenses about being an anthropologist. Today, I’m just a poet, if by poet I mean a kind of sponge. What follows, then, are three attempts at wringing.

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Surprised Sometimes I wonder what they are looking at, but then I remember I am crying behind CVS. When people walk by you when you’re crying behind the CVS they try not to stare but they inevitably look. It’s funny when they buy all of their CVS and have to pass me twice. I think maybe I own this space behind the CVS. I am more menacing than the security guard, who has taken to peering around the corner intermittently, but it is only some white girl crying back there what harm could she cause. I did plan to steal a milk crate behind this CVS, but they only have the new kind, with all the bottle pockets dug out, the useless kind. I don’t want to be a new milk crate is a thought I keep having. Once in Tracy, California I tried to steal a milk crate from behind a Walgreens and got caught. I wanted another for our library made of milk crates. The whole library thing keels over into benches. There was an employee smoking a cigarette who was also behind the Walgreens. I thought he was on his break counting the seconds to clock out, planning some mischief or some other means of living, but he went and fetched the higher up to give me a scolding that snitch. And while she shook her little finger I was looking into his eyes like you and me are more alike than you and her. I can tell by your neck tattoo that you were high last night and so was I. But he just looked away and let his boss take back the milk crate. The milk crate was boring and black but for a minute it was mine. Once at Au Bon Pain in Cambridge, Massachusetts the day before my grandma’s funeral my mom told me about coffin shopping. She compared the cheapest coffin to a milk crate. Maybe an employee of CVS and not Walgreens would have let me keep the milk crate. Once at Kroeger’s in Memphis, Arjuna said he got me a present and it was a milk crate. I don’t know how a coffin could look like a milk crate, a coffin is wood, a milk crate is grated plastic, but that is what my mom said. Once in Yosemite Brook told me her mother was stealing milk crates for furniture while Brook was in the womb. It’s not like I was expecting or wanting something sparkly but as presents go milk crates are like coffins. In fact, the Walgreens employee in Tracy, California was sitting on a milk crate while smoking his cigarette. Once in Hot Springs, Arkansas we thought that there were hot springs. We thought you could go swimming, but all the water was tapped. Instead of swimming in Hot Springs, we got gallon jugs of spring water and we put it in a pink milk crate an old man whose license plate said “genius” gave to me to make me smile.

Tracy, California

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Reckless

I can’t possibly learn enough. It’s impossible to get around the casinos in Vegas, they ’re bigger than you’re supermarkets, & circulated like air-conditioning & it’s always after midnight even when it’s eleven am. We take our chances, Brook & me at the Venetian where there are canals circulating too. We win four dollars, loose thirty, but the tequila is o abundant. Only tw hours for Vegas so we hitchhike with a Furry back to Circus Circus, & no he wasn’t a performer on his way, just a local trying out h a lifestyle, as muc an actor as us and everybody else. The one place in Vegas rk where you can pa a school bus

Tracy, California

I can’t tell whether it’s triumphant or awful to think of a pregnant woman sitting on a milk crate. I would prefer she had a cushion is that patronizing. The spring water was tapped by the US government even though it was on reservation land. Mom opted for the fancy coffin it was lined but what’s the point would grandma have even minded probably not. I called the water genocide water because that is what it is. Arjuna did once say stealing milk crates was like picking windflowers, so the milk crate he gave me is actually a tulip. The security guard is peeking behind the CVS and he would definitely let me have a milk crate if there was an old one to have. Only after I stopped crying behind the CVS did some one ask me what was wrong. You can do really so much with a milk crate. The security guard is definitely singing to himself.

No smoking on the bus. No tie dye near the bus. I have broken these excuses for rules, #2 in a Kroeger’s parking lot. It rained, we danced, my bathing suit is tie dye, that was that. Which way is Woodstock? They ’d wonder at us, out loud & quiet, s. pumping their ga r ei th g Stuffin snacks and yoga mats in their mouths and trunks. Just the Arkansas or g Oakland co-workin hoard headed to the crystal store. I too am bent on becoming something that can veer. I wrap my hair in a towel & traverse the aisles of Walmart each morning when I wake up in the parking lot in my new 40ft

five person home. The cities are different the Walmarts ts are Super Walmar t n’ Do . es im somet fear me or bless me with your eyes, I fellow shoppers. e th e dg ju don’t fat people using the wheelie chairs to wheel around the supermarket. I don’t preach false consciousness though it is ads convenient. It’s he in Whole Foods that are fat & even at the local latte store where laptops are for na screenplays. Arju go to s nt wa ys alwa to Starbucks. He usually gets his way. In Oklahoma City I learn to love along his curves in the basket r of a wheelie chai in a supermarket after midnight while Brigitte’s reading eyes swat each page like Memphis mosquitoes—

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We kill no one, but swerve & lose my empty cup of piss. Every mile in this damn bus costs a dollar. Every mile in this damn bus costs a dollar. Remember, th ere’s no drinking around the cemetery, you might wake up the dead.

Nauseous

The swing of his shoulders was worse than anything he said. His confidence. It startled me. We were supposed to see the Chilocco Indian School, or the ruins of it. The sound of their dying was worse than the fact of it. The squeals. They woke me. We were supposed to be the road to Yosemite. We should have made it by now, but it was uphill, in fog. The bats circling were worse than the emptiness. It hollowed me. We found no one in Bentonville when we arrived. We imagined a town, like any other, at least we imagined a bar. ---There was a gate in our way to the school. A sign with a no exceptions principle addressed to all persons. Beyond the gate was a tree-lined dirt road as far as we could see. There must have been a sign we missed. A turn off to the park somewhere. There was a fountain in the middle of Bentonville, ringed with a small park. A sign dedicated it to the soldiers of the confederate army. Another sign asked for quiet. There was no one to shush but ourselves. --An SUV pulled down the road, first just a speck, then blackening a lane. A man regarded us from inside the vehicle. We were close enough to see him talk. He sauntered towards us. His collared teeshirt. His forehead red from sun. The wavering heat. Our bus was rattling, first just over pebbles, then rocking over boulders. A sound shook our certainty. We were close enough to see the headlights on their hooves. We tumbled forward. Their inefficient bleats. Their broken ribs. The biting cold. A couple strolled on the street across from us, just close enough for us to hear them laughing, to see the streetlight on their holding hands. Cue the couple. Their hetero affection. Their ease. The convenient lack of weather. ---

Tracy, California

is Circus Circ us— the casino w arms children up to capitalism . (Amethysts a re in aisle two.) We steal the code to the KOA pool. We swim like sunburnt winners. Broo k pulls a milk cr ate next to me while I drive us out of Santa Fe once we’ve d one some sun salutations. We’re leaving though it’s pouring, the clouds are fa t as shoppers, & no, we don’t have windshield w ipers & yes, the left hand mirror is off its hinges. I a m efforting to p iss into a cup while driving up a hill & singing as if crying, really keening crying to Mariah Carey. We are snorting wailing over “Fantasy,” whe n the mirror fla ps then just flies off at the darkne ss.

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The Chilocco Indian School was an assimilation factory for almost a hundred years. From 1884 to 1980, it provided vocational and cultural instruction to Native Americans. Native Americans who would come, it was hoped, gain Americanness and lose themselves. Marco was driving through the night, so we could make it by morning. I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up it was too late. He had already hit the mass of them, or they the road. Pigs. We were driving in field of them. I am not sure if Marco knew what he was doing. Bentonville, Arkansas was the site of America’s first Walmart, opened in 1950. It was called Walton’s 5&10. Now, Walton’s serves as a Walmart museum. The town has with a millinery, a bakery, a dairy, and the kind of pharmacy that serves milk shakes. Walmart’s place of origin makes a monument of what it was like before Walmarts. --The man from the SUV tells us we can’t enter the Chilocco School, because it is being used. His collared tee-shirt says Multispectral Laboratories. We thought that it was open to the public, we say. We want to see the limestone buildings. I am led by a docent through the sepia toned darkness to a line condoned off with stanchions. I wait my turn. If you want to see some art, the Walmart family own an art museum across Bentonville. It is called Crystal Bridges. If you want to buy basically anything, there is a super Walmart just minutes away. You can buy a rifle there, as well as pork rinds. --It’s not public, the security guard tells us, it is owned by the tribes. They have rented it to us. He does mention that reservation land is exempted, legally, from treatment as American soil. The docent leads me to a frame which has been erected in a field. On it is the field of pigs we have just massacred. Made vertical, come to face me. Crystal Bridges has two Warhols. Super Walmart has 1,000 shelves. ---

What does Multispectral Laboratories do, we ask. What are you doing here. I am not at liberty to say, his script answers. Google provides: they collaborate with the University of Oklahoma and the US Government and World Surveillance Group. Why this school, we press. He gives us: Drills. Testing, with environmental factors. It’s like a city here. So many buildings. Good control. The scene is frozen, peeled from the landscaped and hoisted at a right angle, then lit with spots. The spots catch the hairs, the black holes of nostrils on the snouts. The side reveals the sod, the roots, the worms, just ripped from the earth. At the bottom of the Bentonville courthouse steps writhing in a pile is the only group of cockroaches I have ever seen. ---We ask the security guard how he felt about what the school did before it closed. He fidgets on the Chilocco side of the gate between us, spots a spider tracing its way across the do not enter sign. He presses him thumb into it with no expression.

Tracy, California

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BY ZAC TOMASZEWSKI IMAGES COURTESY OF PETER ALEXANDER

As a newly-minted UCLA art student, Peter Alexander was inspired to create his earliest sculptures by the resin left over from working on his surfboard. It is a convenient anecdote which makes for a tidy, attractive narrative: an LA boy, growing up by the beach, is patching up his board one day, presumably shirtless and in the shade of several palm trees, when he looks down at the resin in the bottom of the cup and discovers a sculptural material where no one else yet had. It is enticing because it efficiently inserts Southern California lifestylism into any consideration of the work itselfâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;a reliable, timetested hook which Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve used to my own benefit as well.

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Peter Alexander

04. THE BRONZ EA GE :

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And it’s not only in the surfing, which gave Alexander his material, but also in the experience of a slow descent into Los Angeles from the air, marveling at the deepening blue of the Pacific as it receded from the coastline. That experience inspired the wedge shape and the colored gradients of several of the pieces.

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full canonization. Alongside a slew of recent books and films, landmark Los Angeles art institutions have centered their exhibition programs on work produced in that era for two years running. Last year, it was the Getty with Pacific Standard Time (and specifically Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970), which included Alexander’s work alongside many others. This year, it is LACMA with the opening of its extravagant retrospective of James Turrell, another contemporary.

Those works, his series of sharp-edged, semi-translucent geometric resin sculptures [1], emerged in the late 60s at what was a pivotal time in the city’s art history. A young generation of Los Angelesbased artists were beginning to attract the attention of outsiders for the first time. These included artists such as Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, De Wain Valentine, and Alexander, who worked with the unconventional synthetic materials that proliferated due to the region’s postwar aerospace boom. It was a scene fueled by positive collaboration, new technology, and the freedom afforded by the absence of any structure or precedent.

This is an end of innocence moment, when the first generation of regionallyidentified artists is canonized by institutions that didn’t yet exist when they began their careers (recall how, almost as soon as it was erected, Ed Ruscha painted LACMA in flames). For better or worse, the major players of this city have moved to inscribe the memory of these loosely-affiliated 1960’s artists as a bedrock of Los Angeles’ artistic heritage. This cannot help but fundamentally alter the city’s relationship to the broader art world, because it converts Los Angeles art into a brand. This process dilutes the content of the work by attaching it to a set of signifiers that make it more accessible: the timeless appeal of sun-and-surf daydreams, the current vogue for all things mid-century modern. Sooner or later, all artists in Los Angeles find themselves pulled into a conversation with this chimera.

This experimentation occurred in a fragile creative ecosystem that lasted only a few years. By the 1970s, the culture had shifted, and Alexander, sensing this and suffering the ill effects of prolonged exposure to the toxic resins, soon found himself retreating up Malibu’s Tuna Canyon, where he lived with his family in a hand-built cabin and began painting gaudy sunsets. It was a move that alienated him from his former patrons and established his hot-and-cool relationship with LA’s critics and collectors.

Peter Alexander

Of course, the revival of Peter Alexander and the 1960’s generation of Southern California artists has been brewing for some time. Within the last several years it has passed a critical milestone-

I listened to him answer her questions. They spent the first several minutes talking about Los Angeles and he cited a CalTech study about the unique atmospheric components of the area that contribute to its characteristic sense of light. The interviewer was, I believe, Spanish and this tidbit seemed to satisfy her as to the ‘something different’ here.

agree what it is. To some degree, that’s because it’s illusory, constructed and maintained by those with an investment in keeping people interested in LA art. But it is also reflective of one of Los Angeles’ principal enigmas: There is perhaps no other city that invites so many disparate parties to make sweeping pronouncements about its essential nature, this sentence itself being one. Such proclamations are evenly divided between the dismissive and exalting, but seemingly nobody is immune–not natives or lifelong residents, not tourists or refugees from the far corners of our great republic, not even those who’ve never visited.

To posit this ‘something different,’ Peter’s words, are not controversial. Everyone from curators to writers and critics to artists, from large institutions to fledging galleries, proclaims it eagerly, and furthermore sees something of its expression in that 60s scene. Only no one can quite

Peter Alexander

Today, Alexander works in a spacious studio south of the 10 freeway in Santa Monica. With high ceilings and an opening to a small garden in the front, it breathes well in the sun-soaked yet cool air of the Westside. The first time I met him there, an interviewer from the Getty Conservation Institute was also present. Before sitting down with him,

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The city, it seems, has a habit of giving up its innermost secrets cheaply. This phenomenon is especially interesting because LA is a megalopolis with a relative lack of unifying characteristics in a region riven with deep contrasts and divisions. Maybe this fact is itself partially behind the impulse to universalize one’s own experience of the city in a desperate attempt to make this patchwork quilt readable.

Zac Tomaszewski: There’s this thing that’s happened in the last couple years, the full canonization of the generation that you were a part of. How do you react to that kind of institutional embrace? Peter Alexander: With a jaundiced eye. I’m waiting for the shoe to drop, and I see it as kind of sad that it took this long. Or the prejudices were so great, that it took this long. I mean, that’s the thing that’s so curious about it. There were no institutional shows of anybody, except Ruscha, in the past twenty years or maybe longer. I like being revived–it’s better than not being revived, so I can’t complain from that point of view.

Critics, in particular, are prone to describing much of LA-based cultural production, outside of the movies, as symptomatic of the larger regional pathologies they intuit–superficiality, complacency, laxity. On this topic, Peter Alexander points to a passage from a 1971 issue of Artforum that he keeps in his studio. It comes from a review by the critic Joseph Mascheck, who was writing about a New York City exhibition at Pace featuring Alexander and LA contemporaries including Bell, Irwin, and Craig Kauffman: “There’s that whole shallow, indulgent, republic of trivia aspect to Southern California, which reminds us here that not since the invention of bronze casting has anything of consequence happened in that climate. Also, the prospect of hip, young dropout types hanging out in Venice, California making fancy baubles for the rich amuses us.”

Where did the ‘Light & Space’ label originate? Fuck, who knows? It was not invented by anybody who was a part of it. It’s like the ‘finish fetish’. Critics, that’s usually the way that happens. Do you think there’s been any misrepresentation of that moment? Do we care? I mean, beyond the fact that it took so long for it to be okay. I had the idea that LACMA started up in the middle of all this, did they embrace the young artists at the time? No, no, well more so than the East. I remember seeing a show, it was a two-man show at LACMA which was Kenny Price and Bob Irwin, and it was a wonderful show, but beyond that... oh, there was ‘Art & Technology’ which was an exhibit done by Maurice Tuchman and had East coast, West coast people, it was a conglomeration of stuff, it was a bizarre show. Beyond that, I don’t think there was much acceptance here of what we were doing, other than a few people, but institutionally, no.

At the beginning of our interview, I told him I was from here too so we could skip the customary Southern California fluffing. But we did it anyways, because it is unavoidable. “It’s just, it is what it is, it’s absolutely… I don’t know, I love it, I can’t imagine anything else,” he told me. And I had to agree, that’s it exactly.

Were they looking away from California?

else? What are movies, are they aesthetic, are those the decisions? What we used to think was in the art world, when we entered it, it was an honorable thing to do. I would not say today that it’s necessarily an honorable thing to do. There was some hope that maybe there might be something spiritual that could come out of it, whatever one does, that was not tainted by commerce or money for decision-making. I think it’s true, and to a great degree still is true, that when you’re in the studio you don’t think in economic terms, you don’t think ‘well, if I make it four inches bigger I can get more for it’. The decisions with images and all the rest of it are not decided by commerce. The only thing you have any control over is what happens in your studio and, beyond that, just forget it.

Yeah, the institutions out here wanted Eastern credibility and Eastern acceptance, so what they’d do was they would mount shows as if they were in New York. I’m being sort of unfair, but generally speaking, that was the take. And MOCA downtown–they did a small show of Ed Moses and they did even a smaller show of Larry Bell. They never really embraced my generation. How would you characterize the biggest shifts in the LA art world since you started? It’s expanded enormously, the client base… the client base, that’s what it amounts to. Your collector base, there’s no comparison to what it was before. In the 60’s, you’d have a show and if you were lucky, maybe ten, twenty people would show up.

I think a lot of people feel really guilty about the commercial imperative because they’ll either just go into a parody of the market or try and deny that they’re a part of it entirely.

And what about the effects of having an entrenched institutional elite that didn’t used to exist?

It’s nuts. Warhol was brilliant in that he was the first one to really embrace it the way he did. Historically, there are many who did. Reubens, as an example, he had a huge staff. He was really a diplomat, he would go around to various countries and of course, because he was charming and he was a really good painter, the princesses and princes would all ask him to do paintings. So he would do a little maquette and hand it to his chief painter, and they would knock them out.

This place has been accepted as something of substance, its own substance, whatever it may be. And it’s a substance that’s very different than New York because the influences are different. One of the things that’s missing out here, in terms of promotion, is publications. There’s nothing that pursues the artist, so to speak. It’s improving, it’s vastly improved, but the whole thing is based on commerce. If you don’t have any commerce, there’s nothing happening, or else whatever is happening isn’t going to last very long.

So how do you relate to collectors, personally? The thing about commerce, for the artist, aside from the cash flow, is that when somebody buys something, there’s a commitment that is unique. Somebody’s writing out money for something that doesn’t have any real value. The margin in what it costs to make and what you sell it for is

In a way that’s what bothers me the most about the art world, is the total insecurity about the fact that it’s commerce at heart. Why should it be different than anything

Peter Alexander

“I mean, how provincial can you get?” he protested once I’d read it, “everybody makes fancy baubles for the rich.”

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Peter Alexander

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Peter Alexander

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Peter Alexander

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huge, and the only way you make up for that margin is desire. I’ve noticed with various collectors in town who have pieces of mine, they’re thrilled. Well usually, in the start they’re thrilled, and they put them up and then other people see them and hopefully get thrilled, so there’s a continuum of that, and that keeps you alive. Their enthusiasm gets transferred back to you and that helps enormously.

became very clear that it wasn’t. It was hypocritical to think that it was different. Yeah, the anxiety about hypocrisy, I guess that’s what I was thinking about. Do you think it’s possible that something else, I don’t know what you’d call it, can survive within this space supported by commerce? Why not just let it be commerce and put your focus into what you can control, what you care about? Because that’s not going to change.

Frank Gehry, he gets more smoke blown up his ass than anybody I’ve ever known. Everybody loves Frank, right? So, I’ve known him for many years and there was a time in which we had breakfast every other day, for ten years, and I would see all this behavior around him. It didn’t have much of an effect on him, but I remember a conversation not long ago, we have some property in the high desert, a shack with a big chunk out in front of us, about 30 acres, and I said, ‘Frank, why don’t you buy that and put up a place you can go to, to get away from all this stuff?’ I remember saying to him, ‘This was my fantasy about it, Frank.’ And he said, ‘No, I wouldn’t do it’. And I would say, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because I’d be away from the smoke,’ so to speak. I said, ‘But Frank, you get all this smoke blown up your ass, why don’t you get away from it so it doesn’t do anything?’ ‘What’s it do?’ he said, ‘It keeps me going.’ It does. You get it, it goes away, and you want more.

I’m talking about what your aims are, or how you conceptualize what you’re doing, versus how the people around you are looking at it. We have whatever option we want in terms of what we do, how we do it, and what our expectations are from doing it. I come from an old school, you have a family, a wife and children, and you’ve got to support them and all that. So I have always had to see it as something that was commerce, I needed the cash flow in order to live. I’ve always been a part of it that way, for better or for worse. There were times during the 70’s when I was up in Tuna Canyon when we didn’t have a pot to pee in. There was nothing, I wouldn’t know how I was going to put gas in the car, that kind of stuff. One thing you’ve said elsewhere was ‘I believe objects can be made that can have an extraordinary effect on me and others’, which is extremely simple but it resonates as a statement of purpose for me. And I wonder if it’s worth digging into it any more, where does the effect come from?

Yeah, I did, but it was madness from a point of view of what do you live on? It was my ego that got me up there, thinking that I was so great, and then all of the sudden nobody cares. It’s like ‘Oops, I didn’t call that one right.’ It’s the same way as every other world, why would it be any different? We thought it was. We thought it was for a while and then it

It’s absolutely true. Again, I come from a generation, a historical generation, which believes that the magic should be in the object. In other words, some people believe that art comes from music, some 42

city and he would dramatize them, like going into a movie theater. He’d have a black curtain and the painting would be there and when you went into the auditorium you’d get toilet paper rolls so you could scan different parts of the painting. And then when you left, he had his prints there for sale. Going back to the sunsets, I think it’s a little coy to call them dumb. Dumb in the sense that… speaking of it mostly in the context of when I started doing them. I wanted to do something that was so obviously a picture and nothing else but a picture. That’s why I call it something ‘dumb.’ They’re not dumb at all. They’re very difficult and complicated.

I want to talk about your paintings a bit. Have you been painting recently? No, just the drawings. When I started making the castings in urethane, I needed something to do with my hands, to touch something, so I started the drawings.

But strategically dumb?

Many of your first paintings are sunsets, landscapes and seascapes.

Exactly, yeah. That’s a better way to look at it. If one had any doubts about the intellectual aspects of it, there weren’t any.

Because they’re dumb. [2] But you’re fairly knowledgeable about American painting and its history, and I wonder if you relate to that landscape tradition within it.

Your paintings are always living on the edge of something, in several different ways – there’s a nocturnalism there, the sunsets are the edge of night and day, the seascapes are the edge of land and water, there’s the edge of abstraction and representation, and that edge between ‘dumb’ art and, for lack of a better term, fine art.

I do. I thought so, I get really into that stuff too. Like what, the Hudson River School?

Interesting, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Any of the landscapes that I would do… as I said before, with the sunsets, there was a challenge. The edge was how do you deal with a subject that makes it worth doing, so that an audience can see it and get the same thrill that you had from doing it or looking at it. It’s hard to do because it’s a cliché, so you have to revitalize the cliché. This was true with the palm trees too [3], it was the same issue. I would purposely choose images that were clichés, because they’ve been dealt with so much before.

Well, for me Church is the best. Church. Why, because of all the drama? So much drama. You know what Church used to do? Speaking of commerce, this is what he used to do. He’d make his huge paintings like the Andes painting and Niagara, and he would reproduce them in posters. Then he’d have the paintings go from city to 43

Peter Alexander

But that’s what you did. When you went up to the Santa Monica Mountains and built the cabin in the 70’s, you wanted to get away from it, right?

people believe it comes from literary sources. I believe in the music part, and the music part says magic. The literary part goes through your head first, rather than your gut. When I make a decision about color, for an example, it’s all what I find beautiful, and I use the term very loosely. It’s because that’s what I feel right doing, that other people, not many, will be attracted to it the same that way I am. This color will provide a stepping stone for them to go someplace, as it did for me.

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this time as very different, meaning all the attention, it’ll go up, then probably waste away for a while.

That’s an edge to push against. One specific example I was thinking of was the series of the LA Riots, which stands out from the rest of your work because it’s very specific, it’s a specific moment, it’s a political moment, it’s something that people will read into a lot. Yet the paintings themselves are probably the airiest, vaguest, most scarcely representational ones you’ve made, the form opposes the content.

Since the first time I saw any of Peter Alexander’s work, paintings of nighttime aerial views of Los Angeles from the LAX series [5], I’ve admired in it the embrace of the purely sensual. Of what can only be felt, and vaguely, even as it works its way up against what might be called inane. But more than that, it’s the complete lack of defensiveness about that position; it does so while admitting no insecurity. I’m tempted to say this is the characteristic which marks it out as a product of its specific place and time, but that would only reduce it to one easily digestible set of Los Angeles stereotypes, and probably, redolent as it is of Mascheck’s libel, the basest of all. That faint odor of superficiality persists, I think, because this is a city inundated with its own images and representations, accessible to millions across every conceivable type of media. So great is their volume and array that they constitute a nearly universal language, one which acts somewhat oppressively towards direct experience.

Do you know why? They were done in the early 90’s and everybody in Los Angeles was glued to the TV seeing these images. The images came off the TV, I would take a Polaroid of the TV and the Polaroid would be the basis for the painting. The paintings were small because that was the size of the TV screen, but I made no attempt to do it in color because anybody who had seen it would have seen it in color. That’s why I wanted to move it to black and white, because what I was interested in was this glowing image that was coming off the TV which was the fire. That was the simplest way to do it. I had them all lined up, ten panels lined up, and I’d just go boom, boom, boom, boom. I had a show of them and absolutely nothing happened, I didn’t sell one of them, and I haven’t shown them since. [4]

Peter Alexander’s shift from showing polyester sculptures in New York to painting sunsets in the mountains coincided with a tumultuous period of upheaval and wider change: “The end of the 60’s, early 70’s transition was broader than me. We’re all so affected by our times, we like to think we’re not, that we’re unique or something, but it’s all the same. All the stuff that floats around, we pick it up.” The window quickly closed on the brief period of exuberant, optimistic experimentation that the city’s institutions now celebrate.

Time. The significance of cash flow is very important because it gives you time. What you’re doing is you’re buying time. When I started doing what I do, I never thought of it as a return of much, but I felt if I could garner enough money to live on, then that’s okay with me, because all you’re doing is buying the time. Small chunks of time. Now I’m fatigued by that, I’d rather have long chunks of time, for freedom’s sake. That’s happening, and it’s happened numerous times over the past 40 years, it goes up and down and up and down. And that’s why I don’t see

the city, which creates the anxious desire to reject or appropriate them. When one is living in Los Angeles, one is always doing so in relation to all previous depictions of Los Angeles, which in their staggering volume and array constitute a nearly universal language. The easiest, and probably best, explanation for its recent resurgence is simply that it makes money and brings in the crowds, that the generation that would have had seen first-hand this part of Southern California history is now the generation that steers the market. As Alexander thankfully reinforces, there is no need to romanticize the machinations of a commodity marketplace, no need to disguise its inner logic with rhetoric that obfuscates and elevates its function. The magic is in the object; if that maxim proves out, then the object can survive its own commodification, its own institutionalization, it can survive buried under mountains of treacly prose or stranded in deserts of austere theory, because ‘it’ is in none of those things. They confer nothing important to the object except the opportunity to be looked at. IMAGES [1] Green Wedge, 1969 [2] Hey Ben, 1975 [3] Curt, 1998 [4] Vernon, 1992 [5] Bell, 1990

Los Angeles is also a city inundated with its own images and representations, accessible to millions across every conceivable type of media. They are so pervasive that they become somewhat oppressive towards one’s own direct experience of 44

Peter Alexander

Finally, what’s the significance of this moment now for your practice?

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BY ARJUNA NEUMAN IMAGES COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

1990, 1989 or 1993 “Yep the bathroom could go there, the three bedrooms here and here. We’d have to take the wall back about three or four feet like this.”

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Toy Bus - Crosstown Sears Building, 2013

My dad dissects the abandoned water mill with his arms outstretched. He’s animated, excited and mostly in his element. There’s no one else in the room. Well I’m there, but I don’t count. I think I’m six or five or nine. It’s probably a Saturday afternoon. We’d stopped by some estate agent office to pick up keys to another derelict building. My memory of the space isn’t distinct. We saw many buildings. Even on the weekend my father was working. I didn’t mind. The spaces, usually dark and a little damp, filled my mind. I built castles in them, initiated great wars across ripped up carpet tiles; I adventured across rotten wood planks to discover pigeons that were cowboys to be shot with make believe arrows. Maybe I was in my element too.

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“We’d have to put the entry hallway here, it will be tight, not that comfortable, but if the door swings inward, like this, we’ll fit the three rooms just fine.”

her lesson. She hid in the luggage compartment. I’ve never seen this woman again since my grandmother’s funeral in New Jersey– where we ate split pea soup and saltines that tasted like tears.

He said to me, or himself, or to the hairs that stand on end when a good idea is emerging. In his case, a profit margin greater than 20%, in mine, a story. Money like meaning makes you stand up straight–both require space.

I remember, the rain thudding against the diner’s window. In a Jewish funeral you shovel soil onto the coffin three times. My second shovel full of soil had a heavy rock hidden in it; sometimes I wonder if I cracked the casket. Sometimes I make metaphors for histories.

Roadside Diner, Teaneck, New Jersey No one has ever told me a folktale. At least not one that I’ve felt a part of. I’m sad about this. And perhaps nostalgic, like most of us, for a time when I could sit at my grandfather’s knee and listen to simple stories that meant everything (these times never actually existed).

This escape-from-the-Nazis was almost a folktale, closest yet, for me (a lore about a place once home, or leaving home, the last lore maybe).

The folklore I’m imaging is something else. For me, at least, it is a history story, from a place, about a place, the place where you’re from. It makes sense of that place, and it places you there. A lore that comes from an elder: once upon a-long-time ago, your grandfather would do, because the family had been in the same place for many generations, for forever.

July 2013 We went to Memphis thinking about social space. In a school bus, our temporary collective on a road-trip research adventure. We painted it teal, not tiedye. Call it conceptual instagramming, experimental history (we stopped in Marfa), maybe honest nostalgia, which is also to say critical homesickness.

The Eurozone actualizes the way Europe imagined Africa, one nation.

We went to Memphis and found a story. It was our first stop after New Orleans, the most Easterly point in our trip, we were turning backwards now towards Los Angeles; the way back is always easier and we had a new methodology for gathering material and gaining momentum to get home.

Like most tomorrow, I’m not really from anywhere, which is maybe why I lament never being told a folktale, a real one, to call my own. I come from two dispersed families, one willful the other forced; I’m both Chinese and Jewish–yet I don’t feel either.

Mornings at Walmart, 2013

We made a decision to inspect the local, to talk to people, to seek out stories and find out what was actually going on in parts of this country we sometimes call our own.

One time, my grandmother’s sister, who I think is my great aunt–told me how she got out of Nazi Germany aboard a train that first went to Russia. Going the wrong way to go the right way might have been

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We found an artist-run space with a solid web presence, called Crosstown 48

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Arts, age two. Our smart phones told us that one show was an anthology of another artist-run space–Material (named after something Steiner had thought about). One artist space showing another.

with a local church youth group. He offered to let us park our bus in front of the Sears Crosstown building, a hunkering million-and-a-half square feet that made our bus look like a toy, which it was.

We woke up after sleeping by the Mississippi. A mythical river plagued by mosquitoes in the summer. Or rather our school-bus romanticism was pricked by blood-sucking realism–sometimes nostalgia has an antithesis.

We could sleep there he said, there’s a security guard who comes every other night, I’ll let him know. And maybe the mosquitoes won’t bother you in the shadow of a now exported industrialism; they like romantic blood anyway, not brick dust.

We woke up, five of us in that teal tin can. Sweaty, yes sweaty and covered in itchy bitchy bites. Some tone. Tracy called it Low Point Number One, number two involves Spanish guitars and a definition of the concept. I wouldn’t ask her about it.

Chris didn’t say that, although I wish he had. Apparently he studied and maybe taught art at Yale before coming to Memphis for this project. But Chris in his white shirt and gold signet ring wasn’t quite the poetic type; he was more like a charismatic pastor. Which is also to say, and he’ll find out soon enough, that poetry doesn’t mix well with ambition, or maybe it does and that’s what good marketing is.

I’ve forgotten, willfully, that morning, although we listened to Elvis–I remember arriving at Crosstown Arts–perhaps a sight, perhaps Instagram-ready as a real artist™, wild-eyed, sweaty and bitten.

Lunch outside the Memphis Central Post Office, 2013

Australia then California

The show wasn’t much to look at, we bought the book (five dollars) we took a poster. The show or space, invited everyone who had shown at Materials (in one of a hundred shows) to put a piece in. A community was there, well-represented, no artwork stood out, no art stars here, beyond being a part of an artist-run space’s local history, almost a lore. A gathering point without profit. It/felt/good.

I’ve read folklores in print–but orality is not literality. And they are all legend anyway–from legere, to be read. Voices are supposed to be heard–not coded, transmitted, de-coded with emoji.

Some sort of quilting was going on.

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We decided to visit the original Materials Art Space; their last show was still up on the other side of town. We also set up an appointment with Chris, one of three directors of Crosstown Arts, for the following morning, 9 a.m.–to show us around before he met 50

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I’ve seen filmic versions of folktales too; they seem to work better than scribed text–there’s more immersion in an audio/visual world. Ten Canoes, made by an Australian filmmaker, was the first movie to be filmed entirely in aboriginal languages. And, like the language, the place of the film and the story, they all excluded me. It wasn’t mine, never was it supposed to be, the landscape, the story. And maybe that’s why I don’t fully remember it, but why should I–histories like families are something we belong to, or we don’t. It’s more than a question of inheritance.

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I inherited an Australian passport that I don’t know what to do with. It doesn’t feel like mine, although my photograph is in it. I once went on welfare there in Sydney, Australia, and felt cared for by a state not of my own. This is the privileged opposite of domestic colonization. The Canoe film is very different to Werner Herzog’s attempt, Where the Green Ants Go to Dream: A white man’s film about a place that doesn’t belong to him. I remember it clearly; shots of vast mining infrastructure tearing up, with explosives, deeply sacred sites; a group of aborigines huddled to dream in an aisle of a supermarket. And one character who haunts me still, Mute–the last of a band to speak their dialect. He testifies in court, and yet no one is left to understand him. My/definition/of loneliness.

We asked Hamlett another question before seeking out cane sugar Mexican Cokes.

relationships of people, and relationships to the past, which might be the same thing.

“Where does Crosstown Arts get its funding from?”

We asked about his educational or social mission. He said he had none.

He crossed his arms, made a face, but didn’t hesitate. “From the developers of the Sears building.”

Although once, he told his life story to Tracy, describing in detail the houses he had lived in, parceling out periods of his life a floor-plan timeline, or his own veritable folktale.

Materials was to show artwork. To show the art of artists who might not be that visible. The art community in Memphis isn’t so strong, or rather there aren’t that many spaces to show work in–a handful of commercial galleries, one university art school and even fewer artist-run spaces than for-profit galleries. With 100 shows under his belt, Hamlett was a community figure. Perhaps he had an unintentional social mission. He had created a place for artists to gather and show work–he had set up the space in his house, in a neighborhood where artists already lived. He repaired the walls himself after each show. He wasn’t sure where he was moving next; rather he was heading to Rome for a year-long residency.

I’m not quite white, but this is the color of the landscape I know best: landstripped malls, freeways and future lifestyle lots described as integrated. Why don’t they have their own lore, an account for their, our history–or maybe, before now is best forgotten, unaccountable, which is to say perverted for modern.

Rome is very different from Memphis, but perhaps tomorrow they’ll share a timeline to post-industrialism, our Coca-Cola empire is going flat.

Gorin (who is French) moves to California and then makes Routine Pleasures about (maybe his) displacement–somewhere in the film he proposes the general idea with red inter-titles:

That was 50 years ago, and maybe today, the other way around is true. Materials Art Space We forgot the acid but remembered the tape recorders, our smartphones at least. We piled into Materials still sweaty–there was a black and white cat living with the sculptures, lucky not complicit. Materials

A money pump is always desirable, especially in the poorest yet fattest parts of America–and who’s to say there’s no such thing as a free grant? 52

Sears Building Parking Lot

Else time, then 2013 again

We spent the night in the shadow of the Sears building. We brought ice cream for the security guard who watched over us. The mosquitoes didn’t come as drones. We would sleep well; after all we had a meeting at nine a.m. the next day. The only appointment we had for a month on the road.

Folktales work at the opposite, always placing–always homing. The challenge with documenting oral history and folklore is that the context of the story’s telling is as important as the story itself–voice in place, you have to be here to hear, why even shout?

As I lay there in one of our bus benches that folded into a bed–I thought about the workshop we organized in the Bywater of New Orleans. We had managed to invite a woman who was starting a new high school–after the educational disaster that followed the floods. I fell asleep thinking about her reference to the Creative Class. Or rather, the premise of the progressive school she was starting was to groom little people to enter the creative class–the prophesied wealth bracket of the future.

This hearing in real time establishes feelings of belonging, through a meaningful relationship to an actual person who relays the history of that actual place. With each re-telling of the story of that place, communities of hearing, which are relationships of culture, are made. Sometimes art gathers up a space like a folktale, while other times artists only add surplus value (not their own) to a neighborhood readying it for development. “Revitalization” overlays this new value, a culture where meaning is profit first, on to old places, disregarding original histories and cultures, disregarding whatever stories might already be in place.

She asked us, a room mostly full of artists, what kinds of environments are best for producing creativity? And then what moods help the creative process? She wanted design advice for her classrooms. And emotional advice on how to train affect designers.

We have learned how to do this so well, but we’ve forgotten how we were so violent–the politic of remembering first then, we’ll call it an assembly of displacements.

9:05 a.m. There’s an old flea market in the Crosstown District–it stands between Crosstown Arts and the Sears Crosstown Development. If this were a war it would be a no man’s land (I’d prefer that), but this is, in fact, a collaboration,” which is actually

The last argument I had with my father was about squatting. To him, space is value, squatting is theft. To me, space is meaning waiting to be filled with 53

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We asked him about his Anthology Show. He talked about Crosstown Arts with respect. He admired the project; he described it in social practice terms: an art project that will rejuvenate an entire neighborhood–it is ambitious but appreciated. He told us that he had received funding, like all the other artist-run spaces in Memphis, from Crosstown Arts to bring culture to the Crosstown neighborhood.

Landscape is the American West’s political subject, while in Europe it is history.

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was a small apartment gallery, or rather the store front underneath a person’s home. Hamlett, the resident, artist and curator, was in the middle of a divorce. This being the real reason for the end of Materials, they had to sell the house.

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Our teal school bus is helping this process–like an Instagram filter. Artist culture is being overlayed, readying the neighborhood well before the “vertical urban village” is even started. This was once an organic process, artists love cheap rent and space–the creative class follows the artists, who are then followed by adventurous bankers. Neighborhoods inevitably forget themselves and turn hip; American Apparel, faux-brick lofts and dollars signs follow. This story we know well from Williamsburg, Bushwick, Silver Lake, Echo Park and today, Highland Park.

He tells us, excitedly, in his public relations element, that he will reduce the flea market consignment, arms outstretched, to one-fifth its size to build an after school arts program. After all we must remember what was once here, or rather we must remember so that we can forget. After Memphis we were chased by a storm across Oklahoma. The sky there is bigger and more beautiful than anywhere I know, it seems to swallow up the land of the so-called Native State.

Like any ambitious industry, integration will add value (rubber plantations paid for by the British Empire as the rubber tire was invented)–art paired with ambition is the best marketing: an apartment complex with integrated culturally sophisticated programming (taken from Crosstown’s website) attracts the creative classes. It’s funny (as in perverse) to think of culture as an industry, not one that produces products (paintings, sculptures and installations are all incidental), but an industry that produces lifestyles as assets–inadvertent complicity, like a family business.

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Chris tells us–the flea market is far too messy or noisy, for the future neighborhood he is helping envision as a property developer’s creative assistant. He has plans to tidy it up, quiet it down. He will keep it–as a token monument (like all those indigenous street names). But the building, which he is artistically managing, will be made more appropriate, more hygienic.

AND THE

Y D

Diagonal integration happens because value like meaning (here) is accrued by association. Ezra Pound meets Wallpaper*–forging an ideogrammic capitalism where concrete lifestyles accrue abstract value, the image and prevalence of fixed gear bicycle in a neighborhood increases someone else’s profit margin.

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with: old, odd things, beyond vintage, bargains from great-great–grand-relatives; objects which have stories worn into the elbows; the magic of a black and white photograph of a stranger in clothes that look too hip today; and mostly a consortium of folklores with no one to tell their story. After the yard sale, after we had to move.

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to say diagonal integration. Despite Chris’ pastorly claims that the funders for his project are “anonymous” yet very generous. There is no such thing as a free grant.

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Like all flea markets of our imagination, the one in Crosstown is filled to the roof 54

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BY JULIE NIEMI IMAGES COURTESY OF JANCAR JONES LOS ANGELES

routine (life) to indulge in Doge memes or the constant scroll of Instagram or Tumblr. Or what about the more personal and heart wrenching? What your ex-lover’s new lover is enjoying with them now– nostalgic pauses. In all their immaterial glory, we want to take these memories with us.

“Fables exist both as images and as stories, but they also relay behaviors. They are one of the first user-generated structures for socio cultural-imitation, and can serve as a model for understanding the shifts in information hierarchies that are occurring throughout society as our globalized economy moves away from a packaged good media towards a conversational media,” writes Joel Dean in his accompanying text to his first solo show, The Mutant and the Melody, last September at Jancar Jones Gallery in Los Angeles.

Let’s return to Joel Dean’s work. Communication–specifically the oral history told through fables and stories–have a significant place in Dean’s work. But there is equally an emotional currency of take, exchange, and document that is a point of departure not fully realized in Dean’s solo show. Functioning in two different mediums - thermo chromatic panels and 1,283 stress relief toys–the totality of the work is a communicative call and response, similar to the functionality of the talking drums. The work wants you to participate, begs you to take and cannot function otherwise.

While looking at Dean’s work, I started thinking about the variations of fables and stories, and messages communicating emotional currency and urgency. Let’s begin at the origin: talking drums use thumping melodic codes to carry fountains of oratory melodies across surrounding villages. The talking drum signaled small sets of rhythmic messages, signifying a direct action based on their tonation alone, void of any vowels or consonants: attack; retreat; church; dinner, et cetera. The drums immateriality signaled an action, no documentation or formality required–just a formal call and response. How do stories and fables connect to Dean’s objects? And what are the behavioral (emotional/physical) images of fables and stories that procure from a collective group or voice?

Tubes of florescent bulbs line the ceiling of Jancar Jones, heightening Dean’s four, seven-foot aluminum mirrors treated in thermochromic pigment, carefully propped against the wall. Titled Because four is better than one, the pigment picks up on heat in the room. To fully activate the pigment, large groups of people need to gather, and like the title, stresses a need to shift away from a state of solitude to a public space where constant hangouts in the gallery activate the panels. Like a mood ring, the panels shift in color as they pick up collective emotion from large crowds, they perform and die as the crowd ebb and flows, die in their aesthetic function if left in solitude.

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Scattered across the floor like a children’s ball pit, Dean’s body weight is portioned out in grey rock shaped stressrelief toys, titled YOLO. In it’s weightsignificance and aesthetic nature, YOLO nods to Felix Gonzalez Torres’ 1991 candy mound of love, loss, and decomposition: 57

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Communication is still–like the talking drums–a series of tonalities left to fleet through the ears. Yet many professions, such as communication directors or marketers in the corporate or nonprofit industry–a position I hold in the workforce–excessively track and document the process in which we speak and transmit information. And at our leisure, we take breaks from boredom (feeling) or

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Portrait of Ross in L.A. While the panels faded as people fleeted, I found YOLO wasn’t necessarily about disappearance in a physical or emotional sense but more curious about networks and bundling of stress. When Googling “stress relief toys,” I found Officeplayground.com offered a varity of toys: Pent up sexual stress? No problem. Office Playground offers penises and single breasts. In need of corporate iconography? The Taco Bell chihuahua and Ronald McDonald are for sale for an artificial fix. In their nostalgic essence, these toys are reminiscent of 1980s office culture, where we were taught to go to work, funnel our stress into the object of our desire, clock out and go home. At 19 cents a piece, Dean ordered a 1,283 of the “Hard” Marble Rocks for you to squeeze and take home. And for months, his studio practice consisted of working at a local gallery earning $300 to order the rocks. The Mutant and the Melody is the media break we always wanted: a gathering of people to collectively call and respond to objects of our collective past. During the duration of the show, people left the gallery with a single squishy rock in hand, asked to respond to their rigid and rhythmic hyperrealistic quality. While the talking drums were a primal mode of call and response between distant places, Dean’s rocks were reminisce of yesterday’s corporate environment, while the panels were fleeting presence. Dean’s show became an object of gratification, bringing nostalgic remembrance to share and perhaps forget. The Mutant and the Melody

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create a centralized location, even if it’s a website, then people from all over the world can look through this window at things that they may never see otherwise. In this centralized place people can see all of the work that is being done,” Rosenboom explains. The website also hosts a variety of resources such as an event calendar and an archive containing a collection of member work. The many layers of artistic practices in CULA are displayed in this compilation, including work like Eron Rauch’s photographic series Apartment Homes, a graceful architectural collection that articulates the nuances of LA apartments. The blog-like archive also exhibits many of the musical compositions of CULA with live video performances of jazz orchestras and newly released albums like Kingsize Sessions by experimental jazz-rock group, Dr. MiNT.

BY ALLY HASCHE PHOTOS BY ERON RAUCH Creative Underground Los Angeles, the new local artist collective and brainchild of musician Daniel Rosenboom, is building support for artistic freedom in a variety of industries ranging from music, art, writing, film, and performance. While artists commonly find themselves bogged down by the restrictions of the freelance community, Rosenboom and his crew aim to build a platform where LA-based artists can freely execute their creative ideas without apprehension towards distorting their industryready resumes. “People in LA are often working on their own little island with a megaphone going, “Hey! Look what I’m doing, it’s cool,” Rosenboom says, “By bringing these disparate elements together to a place where there are like-minded people, we begin to actually call the scene something.” In a city associated with hopeful transplants and graduating classes of art and music students, support structures such as CULA are aiming to collaborate, explore and connect creative ideas.

Named the 2013 “Face to Watch” in Jazz by the LA Times, Rosenboom is well known as a vibrant trumpet artist, composer and producer in the innovation Los Angeles jazz scene. He is active in experimental groups such as The Daniel Rosenboom Quintet, PLOTZ! and Dr. MiNT and has appeared on countless records with names in music like Vinnie Giola, and Dorian Wood. Because of Rosenboom’s involvement in the LA jazz scene, CULA has become a hub for experimental jazz musicians. Members, including Jose Gurria (drummer/composer), Gavin Templeton (saxophonist/composer) and Alex Noice (guitarist/composer), have developed credibility in recent years for taking a broad range of genres and incorporating them into a vibrant direction of jazz.

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CULA artists are encouraged to collaborate across genres, creating a larger network of artists to develop new work. While we have seen similar support systems around Los Angeles like the SilverLake Art Collective and LA Fort, CULA operates without a physical space, instead existing as a network of tightknit connections that use the website as their stomping grounds. “If you can

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While CULA doesn’t have a ground space for the collective, they work with partnering venues such as the Blue Whale, one of this city’s renowned live jazz bars located in Little Tokyo. The Blue Whale opened in 2009 under Joon Lee and has since developed into a venue that hosts some of LA’s most cutting-edge jazz acts. CULA has hosted various residency nights at the Blue Whale. These events become multifaceted in their display of work; while the patio adjacent to the bar can function as a small exhibition space for art installations, the large stage and comfortable indoor seating arrangements are meant to host an experience for truly listening to the music. But the venue and CULA enjoy these collaborations beyond simply providing a stimulating experience for the show-goer. Rosenboom and the rest of the collective emphasize the proper treatment of artists in all practices and stress that this is one of the reasons why CULA and Joon Lee have had such a successful relationship. “It’s beyond the money for Joon. One of the things that excites him is seeing people at their most artistically enlightened state. He has been extremely supportive of us who are a little less known and who are pushing things that are not as mainstream and sometimes downright strange,” Rosenboom says.

outdoor concert series. This included a similar display of work that the Blue Whale residency nights provide, an array of music and art from across the spectrum of what the members have to offer– visual backdrop light installations from artist Eron Rauch and adventurous jazz by Slumgum and The Daniel Rosenboom Quintet. The collective’s interest in providing a space for artists/musicians/performers to feel free in their practices stems from the restrictions that the LA entertainment industry can have on creative labor. The collective’s mission aims to acknowledge the mainstream entertainment industry but to break the idea that it is LA’s only offer for opportunity. “It’s really easy for people from an outside perspective to think that Hollywood is what Los Angeles is all about, but we don’t think that’s true which is a big motivator for us.” Rosenboom says. CULA was created to invite these people to invest more energy in their own ideas and projects outside of the Los Angeles entertainment industry. As their mission states: “Los Angeles is a mecca for dedicated dreamers from every corner of the globe, working at the top of their craft in every imaginable discipline. But the vast majority of these amazing artists find themselves lost in the deluge, their astonishing gifts unrecognized. That’s why we’re doing Creative Underground Los Angeles.”

CULA

The group has also expanded beyond musical venues for their stages: last August they showcased a variety of work at the Armand Hammer Museum’s JazzPOP

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08. FOLLOW IN

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EMILY REO

CRIMINAL HYGIENE “You say I’m inconsistent/Have to admit, I’m fucking persistent,” sings Michael Fiore, before “I’ll think of changing/ when you rearrange me.”His tossed off observations on Criminal Hygiene’s debut CRMNL HYGNE double as underdog mantras, doused in beer and angst. The seventeen-song onslaught seems as if it could fall apart at any moment, providing a ramshackle charm that has drawn many comparisons to Hootenanny era Replacements. Following in the ‘Mats footsteps, Criminal Hygiene have garnered much attention for their raucous live show, which most famously got them banned from playing the Redwood. Forever. You can feel that sort of energy all over the record in off-kilter, up-tempo burners such as “Dirty Knees,” or the more sinister sludge of “Beneath the Flame.” However, the most memorable moments of CRMNL HYGNE manifest themselves when the band dials it down, and focuses all that vitality into the woozy and introspective “Immortal Eighteens,” and “Rearrange Me.” Here the band’s excellent pop instincts raise above all the guitar squall. Album standout “Blak Water” begins with “ooo’s” as saccharine as any Weezer single, aiming straight at amygdala with the economy and bruised sonics of Guided By Voices. Criminal Hygiene turn each loser-tale into triumph, proving that there really is no success like failure. Here victory is measured in beer and sweat, so just enjoy the hangover. -Lowell Heflin. Photo by David Uzzardi

Forged in the ethos of the FMLY artist collective coined “Do It Together” community, and refined through personal dedication to process, Emily Reo’s Olive Juice marks a striking contrast to its predecessors in clarity. Meandering percussion that provided abstract texture in the past find purpose on Olive Juice. Each song is propelled, rather than adrift, like a rocket in the silence of space. Wobbly synths wriggle in and out of each ear, every note allowed to breathe and fully bloom. Reo’s voice benefits most from the improved fidelity, which used to seem like an obscure echo from a corner of the room, is now engaging, conversational, and direct. On “Peach,” Reo explores the taciturn, “This place looks familiar/I think we went here while sleeping,” before exposing the tight lipped thoughts buried in our hearts in an eruption of harmonies, lamenting “You had to be all alone.” Degraded sound as aesthetic space is warm, inviting and personal. Those qualities perfectly benefited the devotional, trance inducing examinations of Reo’s past incarnations. However, where once we were enamored by the blurry images we viewed from afar, the newly found confidence summoned in Olive Juice burst all around us like sparklers in a dark room. By album apex “Metal,” we reach the moon we’ve set our sights on, the object reflecting our light, which stands just as lonely as we are. -Lowell Heflin. Photo by Daniel Dorsa

Following Sound

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JULIA HOLTER

THE ICARUS LINE

Julia Holter’s summer release of her third studio album, Loud City Song, is a multiinstrumental poetic symphony–a dually cohesive yet fragmented piece that’s definition can be found somewhere between a lullaby and a lucid dream. Many of the songs start and end abruptly; following a staccato cadence of storytelling, her words cascade into sweeping breaths that recall distant memory alongside present reflections about human connection, a city, and the emotions which loom there. Narratives play out like a motion picture, such as with the third track on the album, “Horns Surrounding Me.” The song begins with what sounds like people rustling in the woods, followed by a panicked warning: “…Chasing after me…” is heard as dramatic tones accumulate. Woven within these loose narratives lies a soft vulnerability that echoes the exemplary artist Joni Mitchell and chants alongside contemporary folk singers such as Joanna Newsom. Amidst repetitious percussion that erupts into violin strings that scream into chaotic static, the far ranging compositions succeed in illustrating the complexity of feeling. Loud City Song becomes a testament to the heavy, emotional caldron that quietly lives beneath the skins of cities. -Casey Winkleman. Photo by Rick Bhato

Those who hold rock ‘n’ roll as sacred, visceral, and vital in 2013 find themselves strangers in a strange land. Rock ‘n’ roll requires unholy devotion. It is something buried deep in the marrow of the soul. It stands in direct opposition of the current musical landscape, which more than not, is content to serve as a lifestyle supplement. Thankfully for the remaining devout, the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll is alive and well in Los Angeles’ high priests of sonic decapitation, the Icarus Line. Slave Vows is the Icarus Line’s fifth studio album, and the loudest since the criminally underrated Penance Soiree. Each song is a menacing, Molotov cocktail thrust at the heart of empire. Guitars smolder, expand, contract, rise like smoke, and then explode like bloated suns on their deathbed. Joe Cardamone yelps and howls as if his very life depends on it, spitting fire and brimstone from a pulpit built out of pummeling drums and crushed vacuum tubes. You can imagine him leaping from table to table, throwing candles, acting a man possessed as he did at an unannounced performance at Echo Park’s Taix. When asked by the L.A. Record to ruminate on his formula for success, Cardamone offered, “What do I know…except annihilate everybody?” Never has annihilation felt so life affirming. -Lowell Heflin. Photo by Sandra Sorensen

VI KAN WAKAN

ANDERSON PAAK

After their humble beginning in 2012, Kan Wakan emerged into the Los Angeles music scene working towards the release of their upcoming album, Moving On. Their sound is reminiscent of a full bodied, orchestral moonscape that invites listeners to traverse the terrain of both subtle and epic arrangements. Kan Wakan’s appearance is rejuvenating for the standards of what makes a truly harmonious group, each variation of instrumentals work together to build a narrative sonic experience. Lead vocalist Kristianne Bautista puppeteers the bold instrumentals with a voice that’s on par with Leslie Feist and Victoria Legrand, elegantly dancing each song through a romantic journey. The origins of Kan Wakan’s cinematic and rich techniques stem from band creator, producer, composer and musician Gueorgui I. Linev, whose plan was originally to start Kan Wakan as a solely instrumental orchestral ensemble. After the addition of a few unexpected instruments and Bautista’s voice, Kan Wakan was born into its present form; an ode to the space cowboy, a soundtrack to an exploration of the cosmos, a vibrant and emotional display of gracefully executed music. -Ally Hasche. Photo by Cameron Hopkins

While recording 2000’s legendary Voodoo, D’Angelo jammed out to his favorite records to get into a groove. Legendary music critic Touré’s account of the Voodoo sessions talks about how a jam off of Prince’s Parade eventually morphed into a song that became D’Angelo’s hit “Africa.” This was creation as alchemy. When cover songs become originals they bear the mark of their origin. Not just songs inspired by, but songs created from others.The story behind LA soul singer/percussionist Anderson Paak’s new EP, Cover Art, would do D’Angelo proud. The songs Paak chose for the EP were the ones he and his band worked through while recording his upcoming full-length album. Both D’Angelo and Paak used existing material as a jumping-off point, but with Cover Art Paak gives us a rare document of the evolution from source material to new creation. Here, Paak wrings all the greasy soul he can out of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Neil Young, even the Postal Service. The most impressive sleight of hand may be his rendering of Toto’s jaunty “Hold the Line” into breath-of-life hip-hop jazz. Cover Art, then, is midway between the D’Angelo Parade and the finished Voodoo. But to call it merely a sketch would do it a disservice. Cover Art stands on its own, but that it may become a footnote in Paak’s catalog is only a testament to his potential. -Jordan Pedersen. Photo by Elenora Stills

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Derde Verde, Echo Park’s own rock trio is comprised of Jonathan Schwarz (bass), Dylan McKenzie (guitar/vocals) and Matthias Wagner (drums). Ally Hasche sat down with the band to discuss their history, the East LA’s music scene, and the trio’s future plans.

different programs though. Metthias and I were in jazz studies and Dylan was in guitar performance. But CalArts is a pretty collaborative place that allowed us to work with each other. Do you think that you’re heavily influenced by jazz after graduating in jazz studies programs?

Ally Hasche: How did Derde Verde come together?

Jonathan: I think that we do write with it. We use some unique structures and rhythmic ideas that are based on things we developed when we were studying, but I don’t think that’s how we base our songs. That would be something to complement a song.

Dylan: John and I had been playing together at CalArts where we met in 2008. All three of us were studying music there. We were working a lot on instrumental music at the time and it kind of evolved into song writing and then eventually into a band. We started playing shows but we didn’t even really have a band name and we weren’t working with Metthias yet. We had been playing with a number of drummers that we met at the school. It didn’t really click as a band with Metthias until 2010 after we had been out of school for a year.

Dylan: There is a spontaneity that’s very much a part of jazz, because of the music that we’ve listened to and played throughout our lives we are open to that. Sometimes in the music we write there is space for some unpredictable things to happen. Did you have similar influences and music preferences when you started the band?

Derde Verde

Jonathan: When I originally met Dylan one of the first things we talked about was similar musical tastes. We all come from a little bit of our own different backgrounds but we share similar influences.

So you were you all working towards your Bachelor’s degrees at CalArts? Jonathan: Yes. We were in 71

Derde Verde

PHOTO BY EVEN KEEL

Jonathan: We were getting ready to do a tour and Metthias was available to join us.

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Have your influences changed?

get on people’s radar. But I try to kind of forget about that, too.

Dylan: It’s definitely changing all the time. There are some things that always are kind of at the core. But we’ve been listening to a lot of different things lately that come into our core.

So that you’re not directly influenced by it? Dylan: I do think about how we are a trio and there aren’t a lot of trios out there, so to think about bands like Yo La Tengo...I would be happy to say that we are influenced by them. I think we do our own thing but I like to be included in that, I wouldn’t mind being associated with them.

What are the kind of things at the core? Dylan: I think from a songwriting perspective...Elliott Smith, Beck, maybe even some more classic things like Neil Young. I know John and I both like Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and of course The Beatles.

Would you contribute some of the complexities of your song writing and composition to your education? Do you think it’s been helpful for you to have studied music?

Jonathan: ...and Yo La Tengo Dylan: Yo La Tengo is an influence. Jonathan: One of the things we look for, I mean at least for me, is songwriting that’s supported by interesting arrangements or production. The foundation of a song is really important. Good melody and lyrics are important, and the perspective that it takes makes a big difference on how someone listens to it.

Dylan: I don’t think that it’s necessarily a conscious thing and I don’t think we try to be academic in our approach. Metthias: CalArts was also not a very academic education, it was very hands on. It was more about playing than anything else.

Critics have said that your music refuses to be pigeonholed, do you classify your music in any particular way?

Focusing on Let Me Be a Light, was there specific inspiration behind that EP? Do you think it was darker than what you had put out before? Maybe in comparison to Moon/Mirror?

Jonathan: It’s difficult to classify our music. Dylan: A lot of times we look to what other people have said. I like some of the things that I have heard but I don’t feel like we need to necessarily identify with it. When a band is getting started and people don’t really know who they are it’s important to use some familiar names to help you

Dylan: I think it’s darker and maybe a little more bare. It’s more honed in than what we have done before.

Derde Verde

Dylan: We want to play more venues but we really like playing Troubadour. We were excited to play there because a lot of people that we like have played there. It’s a very historic venue and the sound is great. Jonathan: Bootleg Bar. Dylan: We are trying to get out there and reach more people. We have played Pehr Space many times, we love playing Pehr Space. What are your observations about the LA music scene? Do you think that it’s supportive, or oversaturated?

Jonathan: I think there are also themes that Dylan brought in with the lyrics throughout all of the songs that helped influence the way we recorded them. There’s an undercurrent going on that joins them together.

Dylan: I definitely think it’s oversaturated but I don’t know if that’s a problem. I think it’s good that there’s so much going on, in some ways it generates more opportunities but it also keeps you on your toes. You see people working so hard that you also want to be doing a lot. At the same time, it’s challenging in a very oversaturated environment to find a reason to get people to come to your show when there can be so much going on in one night.

Dylan: The previous recordings we made were kind of just gathering a bunch of songs that were written at different time periods. This time they were all written within the same time span and with the same kind of concepts that were on my mind.

Jonathan: Promoters also expect bands to bring people out as opposed to having a venue who has a quality about it that brings people out on its own.

Are there any LA bands that you think deserve specific attention right now? Jonathan: Wild Pack of Canaries, they’re from Long Beach area. Simone White.

Dylan: There’s a lot of pressure on the artists to do most of the work. Promoters are kind of taking advantage of that.

Metthias: Pitch Like Masses and the World Record.

Jonathan: The bills you see in LA are not always well thought out. There are a lot of bills that are all over the place, which can be cool but sometimes its not complimentary to the musicians. There’s a lot of people who go to see music in LA will go

Dylan: There’s a lot of people doing cool things. Also, Walsh Set Trio, Slumgum and Sanglorians. What are some of the venues you like playing in LA?

Derde Verde

Jonathan: The actual recording approach was different than what we have done before. On the last release we had taken a lot of time to explore with over dubs, and this most recent one was a little more live. For Let Me Be a Light we had the songs more prepared and ready to record.

Dylan: We toured and played live for a long time with these songs. We really wanted to capture the way we played these songs as a trio. We were pretty happy with the arrangement that we had and the way the songs sounded when we got together to play them. We didn’t really feel like we needed to do that much to them. In the past when we recorded we would try something and then try different layers. This time with the lyrics and the instruments we had the right parts there and didn’t need to add anything, we wanted to capture the live energy of these songs.

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out for one band and then leave right away instead of hangout for a night to see music. Sometimes people aren’t going out for music, they are going out for their friends or the band they want to see but they leave as soon as the band’s are done playing, which makes it challenging in LA.

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Do you think it’s difficult to be a musician in LA without a day job? Jonathan: Definitely. I know a lot of people who are professional musicians but they definitely have other jobs. Dylan: Every musician that I know is working another job.

If the lineups were more thought-out you might get people staying for an entire show.

Is it more reliable as a musician these days to look to live shows as a form of income rather than depending on a record deal?

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s nice to go out for a band and see other acts that you identify with somehow or that you feel something from. A lot of times in LA it’s really far across the spectrum and people feel alienated from what they’re apart of on a certain night.

Jonathan: I think it’s live performance and licensing. Dylan: Even people with record deals aren’t making enough money in record sales.

How do you think that can improve?

What can we expect next from you guys?

Jonathan: The best thing is for a venue to have a good reputation so people can go out to a venue to see music that they trust will be good. Then the venue can find bands they think are good and expose them to the public.

Dylan: We’re writing now. Jonathan: We’re also planning a tour for spring and a record for this year. Dylan: We’re shooting for a full length, we have never done a proper full length. I think the music has been going in a certain direction, and we’ve gotten better at recording.

Dylan: It’s important to have good promoters who care about the artists and care that the music is heard. That should be the focus, and venues should make it their responsibility to hire those types of promoters and not people who are just concerned with the draw.

Jonathan: The writing process is also developing in certain ways. It’s interesting because the whole time we have been playing together the writing has gone through phases. We did a lot of jamming for a long time, just getting more familiar with each other. Now we can communicate to each other with different types of ideas, so that is the approach we are currently taking.

Jonathan: The number one question you get when booking a gig is “how many people you can draw? That’s not necessarily an artistic or creative question.

Derde Verde

In Residence at the Echo

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One of the pioneers of East LA residency nights and Senior Talent Buyer for The Echo/Echoplex, Liz Garo, sat down with Ally Hasche to talk about booking residencies, the growth of the East LA music scene, and the origins of The Echo.

headline the venue. That was loosely the formula, but now it has shifted for various reasons. Echo has always tended to give bands residencies earlier than most, Satellite has more of a “you have to prove yourself” process.

Ally Hasche: How did the concept for the residencies develop?

Do they require that their resident bands be a bit more established?

Liz Garo: When Mitchell Frank started Spaceland in Silver Lake I used to do the booking for that room. We kind of stole the idea from Club Lingerie, a club in Hollywood in the 80s. When Spaceland first opened it was pretty much only local bands, so we started picking one local band per month to do a Monday residency in ‘93. Mondays used to be one of the slowest nights of the week so we made it free and 21+ and it just became a community hangout.

Yeah, and with the Echo it’s a little looser and I’ll get bands in earlier than most. That’s just the way my brain thinks. That’s probably really helpful for these bands. It’s a great way for artists to be on stage in the same room for four to five weeks while sometimes working on new material. Sometimes they’ll do the residency and then go into the studio. Certain bands are super creative with it, they’ll have an art show on the patio and they will make it an event. Other bands just come in and play it. At the Echo there’s one resident band and then there are three other bands on the bill. Either the resident band books those artists or they work with me in picking those artists, so it’s a real collective that is playing. A lot of times bands are getting their friends to play so it ends up creating a scene. And I know that people who just moved to the neighborhood love the residencies because they’re free.

So Spaceland is now Satellite? Spaceland is now an event producing company–we’re not in that room anymore and the space is now Satellite. The residencies are a tradition so when we opened the Echo 11 years ago we took the concept there. Satellite still does it, Silver Lake Lounge used to do it. It’s actually a thing that a lot of the clubs in the area do. It’s more of an East LA venue trend.

In Residence at the Echo

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Right. Spaceland and Mitchell pioneered it to make it an actual thing. Every venue has a different formula. Traditionally, a band had to work their way up to get a residency. If you got a residency you would have these four shows for free on Mondays, then you take a month or two off and you would be able to

That’s personally how I got introduced to the East LA music scene. So many people tell me that. For us that’s a great thing because we want to brand it as something you can come to on Monday nights and might not know who any of the

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bands are, but you’re going to see quality music. The bands who play at the residencies aren’t throwaway bands.

When thinking about the LA music scene and its dense population of bands, how do you think the residencies help sift out the best bands? Do you think the amount of musicians in LA becomes problematic for the success of the bands?

You can also hear a great band and bring people back the next week to come see them, which inevitably begins to create a more established following for the band.

There are a lot of people in LA so you naturally have a lot of bands. LA has really specific neighborhoods and regions. My friend used to book the Troubadour and we always used to talk about how a band could sell out the Echo and go play the Troubadour and not do as well, and a band can play the Troubadour but not do so well at the Echo. There are certain bands that have neighborhood appeals but I also think if you are a band and you want to be bigger then you have to play a wider range of venues. There have always been a lot of bands in LA. I have been doing booking off and on for 20 years and there has always been a good scene somewhere.

That’s exactly what happens, you create a target audience. I’ve talked to various musicians who have done residencies and they commonly say it was one of the best things that could have happened for the band. Not only do they start to build a following but the consistent playing and practicing schedule can really pull the act together. I don’t think I always realize how good of a thing it is for the band, sometimes I don’t realize deeply on that level what it means to them. A lot of bands will say that it was a turning point, and they became stronger as a band from the residency. It’s the repeated performance, the rehearsing, and having a different audience. It’s a really great thing and everybody has a good time.

It’s never been hard to find a good band here.

So it’s a win-win for everybody. It’s good for the band, the venue, and the community.

In Residence at the Echo

We’ve had lots of bands who have done residencies and have gone on to do bigger things. The Airborne Toxic Event played a residency, as did Silversun Pickups at the Echo. A bunch of bands have come through. Foster the People also did a residency.

What goes on at Dub Club?

and give them a residency and then nothing happens, or on the other hand you think this band will draw tons of people and they don’t. Of course there are the total surprises. I’m a really big fan of Kan Wakan. They did a residency for us in February and it was really early for them to do a residency. I actually became a bigger fan after the residency because they were much stronger live.

It’s classic reggae and dub night so not the cheesy dub stuff, but rather the traditional reggae. It used to be in the Echo but we moved it to the bigger room, the Echoplex, and it fills up almost every week. The Echo opened 11 years ago and the Echoplex opened after? Yeah, the Echoplex opened in 2007. They’re different rooms and different vibes. I love the Echo, it’s more of a little rock ‘n’ roll club.

Do you ever bring residencies back? Normally we don’t, but sometimes we do. That’s kind of an unspoken rule: If you’ve done the residency once you’re not going to do it again. In the former situation I really like Kan Wakan so I probably will bring them back. Criminal Hygiene and Kera and the Lesbians are both doing residencies this year. Both of those bands are bands that the office and I really like. I don’t know if they are going to become big stars but they make good music and they both work really hard and deserve to have a residency.

Going back to booking the residencies, is easy to find bands? Do they apply to be residents? It’s easy to find bands, but it’s always a search to find really good ones. There are plenty of okay bands out there. The residency is a combination of me or the venue having a relationship with the bands, then booking them a few times and getting a feel for them. Is this music something that has potential to go further? Sometimes bands ask me for the residency and sometimes I reach out to the bands. Depending on how smart the band is and how strategic they are, they will want to make sure they are having a residency shortly after their EP release. That’s when it works the best: when artists are releasing something new and it all ties together. Bands get a buzz to play a live show and promote their recorded music.

They’re primarily local acts? That’s kind of the key to it, they’re local bands from the neighborhood; Echo Park, Silver Lake, Highland Park, and this general area. So primarily East LA? Pretty much. In some situations we have tried out bands from Hollywood but it doesn’t really work. It’s really about being in the neighborhood and booking bands that are also from the neighborhood because it becomes more of a community.

There’s always a big request for a residencies from the get go. Again, it’s a process of “Are you really doing something?” It’s a gamble. You can think a band is going to be huge

In Residence at the Echo

There’s never been a time where it’s like, oh my god every band is crap. Sometimes there’s a more cohesive scene than other times but there is always quality stuff. In addition to the Monday night residencies we also have three resident dance nights at the Echo. Dub Club is every Wednesday which is one of the longest running clubs that we’ve had; it opened when we opened. We also have Funky Sole which goes every Saturday night. Both of those are really great in that when we first opened, they helped keep Echo going because we were just starting out. Dub Club had an audience right away.

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Have you seen any music trending around LA lately? There is that surfy garage stuff which is great, including Burger Records and all of the bands on that label. Other bands like Hindu Pirates, the Growlers, AllahLas, Beach Party, all of that stuff is great. There is also more psychedelic-y stuff like Strangers Family Band and Spin Drift– they’re a little bit more, well, not droney, but darker. There’s a trend of really polished radio-ready pop songs; bands like Smallpools and Hunter Hunted. Those bands are a little bit more on the commercial side of things. I personally like the scrappy rock ‘n’ roll bands. Are the more commercial pop bands that you talked about playing the Echo? They do. They are more of the ready-forthe-radio type of music. It’s a little more polished. Then there are always bands that can’t be put into any category that we are paying attention to like Fever the Ghost. I really love them and keep talking nonstop about them. Moses Sumney is also an artist that’s probably going to be huge next year if he gets signed and does everything the right way. Mystic Braves are really great too. I’m also paying attention to Hindu Pirates out of Orange County. They did a residency for us and that was out of sheer love for the band. We really wanted to do something for them. It’s fun to pick the residencies because you are giving bands an opportunity. It’s a rite of passage for some bands who have been around the neighborhood for a while.

In Residence at the Echo

PHOTOS Page 75 Robert DeLong by Cristal Jones Page 77 Top: Touché, Bottom: Haunted Summer by Casey Winkleman Page 80 Touché by Casey Winkleman

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Street Dogs

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Street Dogs

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Street Dogs

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CONCEPT BY CLAIRE BOUTELLE PHOTOS BY ERON RAUCH CONTEXT BY MOSKOWITZ

BY JULIE NIEMI ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANNA VALDEZ

Street Dogs

Depression (Era) Food

I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma: the flyover state, the-Oklahomawhere-the -wind-comes-sweeping-down-the-plane-state. The dust bowl state, the state of rednecks and farmers, of the Tulsa Race Riot, and the archetype of the Great Depression. I was raised in a modest two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in a working class neighborhood on the edge of Tulsaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s midtown fairgrounds. In September, when the Tulsa State Fair came through, you could smell greasy funnel cakes, roasted pig on a spit, and deep-fried ham sandwiches. Goddamn was it delicious.

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Cue in my father, who borrowed this archetype of Dustbowl-era Oklahoma straight from the pages of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and from the depths of his own childhood. His mother and father were hit tremendously by the repercussions of the era, both losing their jobs in 1930, leaving them, like many, scrambling to figure out how to raise six kids on a small budget produced by his father, Eddo. He eventually picked up carpentry (a popular trade occupation at the time) to put food on the table and a roof over their tiny heads. They would serve him food from this era of struggle–stews and white bread sandwiches–and lecture in a typical 1950s way, “You should be grateful, son!” The cuisine in the 50s was not too terribly far from the 30s, but into the 90s, things had tremendously changed. Yet the heavy dishes with exotic meats and scraps saved from hunks of day old ham stayed with my father throughout his life, inspiring research as a history professor and more importantly, tormenting his poor children with bland heaping spoonfuls of slop.

Baked bean sandwiches (mashed to a paste and served open face), beef loaf (a.k.a. meatloaf), fresh beef tongue (considered a delicacy!), liver and bacon (favorite from the “Old World”), oxtail stew (a French treat), scalloped cabbage and boiled apples (an old German recipe inspired by my stepmother), and his Finnish mother’s favorite, PB & Mayo. We had a “charity garden,” the modern-day equivalent of the organic garden found in the backyards and cul-de-sacs of many Angeleno homes. But we grew potatoes, topped with bacon fat and heavy Crisco instead of butter. 90

I would find ways to embrace the Depression-era food my father curated so carefully. Picking through casserole dishes and beef cow tongue, I’d often draw ridiculous cartoons or save half of my PB & Mayo to deconstruct with my third grade colleagues over the lunch table the next day at school. They laughed, I cried, realizing I had quite a unique lunch. Thanks Dad. Over the years, “Depression-(era)” food have traversed many semantic meanings. Well into today, as we live through a booming recession of unemployment and shifting methods of production, we find ourselves developing new habits and rituals in what we eat. But how about the shifting focus on foods consumed during emotional strife and feelings of depression? I want to touch on my feelings. I can’t help but think, like the scarcity of the Great Depression; today we are scrambling to find security and safety in our own recession, where new foods are staples of our place and our specific time. Two years ago, this can accurately be articulated during my move from Chicago, driving through Tulsa, finally ending in Los Angeles on old Route 66. On that seven day journey, I sobbed and rejected a new future, embodying Steinbeck’s Grampa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, who retaliated against the Joad’s migration to the promising west coast for better work, more pay and resources. I thought of this narrative as I melodramatically left Chicago–a city I cherished–for LA–a city at the time I fucking despised–all in the name of a new career and new opportunity. I felt grandpa Joad’s hesitation! This drive was symbolically my own emotional Great Depression, and the food consumed upon my arrival to LA is now definitive of my first six months here. Emotions were poured into my experimentation with different foods:

Depression (Era) Food

Wonder Bread was manufactured in my backyard and became an important staple in many Okie homes. Naturally, two pieces of the spongy white bread were also a side staple in my father’s nostalgic dishes:

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Sad Hungover Saturdays were spent consuming the chicken and doughnut hybrid brought by Romero’s Rotisserie Chicken-N-Donuts in Historic Filipinotown. When my grandmother died last September, I promptly left work in Downtown LA, tears streaming down my face, glided down Beverly, turning a right and then a left into the parking lot. Chicken sandwiched between two doughnuts, smothered in maple syrup. Five more doughnuts for dessert. Sweet highs soothed my mourning. Loneliness was boredom, in search of a visceral adventure found in the promise of the PCH: Highway 1. Reel Inn Seafood, where I’d devour boiled lobster and fried fish sandwiches, sipping down sides of tartar sauce and buckets of beer. After four beers, I’d usually make a friend and we’d frogger our way across the highway to the Topanga Beach. We’d fall onto the sand, watching the sunset (“How did I get here?”): Substance to early LA days. I felt comfort.

Monday through Friday lunch time escape: destination Hakata Ramen in Little Tokyo. I’d go up against the lunch rush traffic towards a shopping center on Alameda and 3rd where the small restaurant nooks are always busy with chatty Asian couples and art district twenty-somethings, everyone packed together waiting for the same three tables. With only an hour to spare, I shovel hot spoonfuls of pork ramen into 92

my mouth, saving half for the next day–when I get to push the pork fat around the reheated broth. The pork fat sometimes resembles constellations, thousands of porky little stars in my bowl universe. Small pleasures. Finally, cutting down Santa Monica from east to west, a stop at Irv’s Burgers was always ideal. It was the best burger around–a drippy juicy flattened patty covered in American cheese and grilled to perfection on a flat top grill. The last time I was at Irv’s, I was frantically scooting across town for work. The Hong family sensed my hurried stress and gave me a complimentary milkshake, asking if I’d sign their petition to stay in West Hollywood. I did and my burger plate was inscripted with a personal “thanks <3.” The next week, Irv’s was gone. The evolution of out with the old, in with the new. A tale of gentrification. I will always cherish my Depression (era) foods for how they’ve offered me comfort and even a bazaar facilitation of community. I’ve scoffed as I’ve watched oxtail slide it’s way into high-end cuisines and still prefer my burger with iceberg lettuce instead of arugula. But today my emotional eating habits and nostalgia for the bygone era does not hover so strongly. I’ve picked up on what I still consider strange LA-isms: delivery produce boxes with exotic green things, fetishizing persimmons, and even early (like 8 a.m. early) walks to the Silver Lake farmer’s market. Yet there’s still a part of me with the Okie sensibilities an appreciation for stripped down, simple foods and an affinity for the terrible and nutritionally unsound dishes. And in case you were wondering, I still take my PB & J’s with mayo.

Depression (Era) Food

Financial despair was certainly found in my early two-month stint in West Hollywood. I was broke and drunk; Oki-Dog was the ideal late-nighter. A disgusting ensemble of two hot dogs stuffed into a flour tortilla, covered with chili and pastrami, tucked nicely into a burrito. Sitting on a park bench with my Oki-dog, I watched WeHo come alive and die. Cultural anthropology.

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BY ALLY HASCHE The Los Angeles craft brew scene has been rapidly expanding after Eagle Rock Brewery opened in 2009, the first local brewery to open in LA in 60 years. Ting Su and Jeremy Raub started the operation after finding a passion in home brewing. Their distribution growth extends from Santa Barbara to San Diego with more than 10 signature beers including creations like the Solidarity Black Mild Ale, Populist IPA, and the Equinox Barrel Aged Blond Sour. Ting Su is one of many women in the Los Angeles microbrew industry, as well as an enthusiast for women interested in beer. “I educate myself about beers and try to speak knowledgeably about them in order to break the stereotypes that are associated with women in the beer industry,” Ting says. Eagle Rock Brewery hosts the popular event known as Women’s Beer Forum, a monthly tasting Ting started in order to bring women from around the community to taste and learn about some of beer’s finest flavors. The craft brew scene has emerged from an angle that encourages women to not only better understand the taste and varieties of beer but also become part of the production side of the industry.

PHOTO OF CYRENA NOUZILLE BY RAJ NAIK

Cyrena Nouzille of Ladyface Ale Companie and Hallie Beaune, one half of beer sommelier and author duo the Beer Chicks, talk to Ally Hasche about their history with beer and experience as women in the industry.

LA Craft Brew Queens

Laurie Porter, part–owner of Smog City Brewing Company based out of Torrance, explains, “There are tons of women in all facets of the industry and we meld with the men seamlessly. Talent over gender and community over individuals equals better business and success for all.” The growing presence of women in the greater Los Angeles area who brew beer, manage breweries and tasting rooms, and write about beer is a testament to Porter’s statement.

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CYRENA NOUZILLE Owner of Ladyface Ale Companie Alehouse + Brasserie How did you become involved in the beer industry?

I’m lucky. Maybe it just never occurred to me. I have found the pioneers in the craft beer community to be very welcoming and encouraging. They have paved the way for everyone–male or female–to find their niche in the industry.

My first brew was a college lab experiment as a biology major. It wasn’t really drinkable but that non-seed plant class got me thinking. Years later, my husband gave me a homebrew kit as a birthday gift. After I discovered Belgian ales, I homebrewed for a few years, and inspired by a tour of some celebrity Sonoma County breweries, it occurred to me to try to take things professional. I came home and started researching the craft beer industry and writing a business plan.

Have you personally noticed the increase of women working and participating in craft brew? Particularly in Los Angeles? I think there has always been a number of women filling a broad range of roles in the business–there just aren’t that many that physically brew or work in the cellar or packaging areas. It probably has to do with the physical aspects of the job, so it attracts women that like to work hard and get dirty. Do I wish I knew as much as some of the guys? Sure. Do I wish I could lift a 1/2 barrel keg by myself?

What has your experience been like as an actively working woman involved in the beer industry?

epiphany that makes you realize there are other beers in the world and that you don’t have to drink you boyfriend’s beer anymore. One of my goals when we opened Ladyface was to boost the number of female beer enthusiasts and I have definitely noticed an increased number of gals in Ladyface choosing beer over wine or cocktails. Women who tell me they don’t really like beer, always get my response, “You just haven’t found your beer yet.” Do you have any advice for women who are interested in getting into the beer business?

What about female consumers? Have you noticed an increase in female beer drinkers throughout your career?

Learn as much as you can. I have been told by male beer enthusiasts that they believe women have more sophisticated palettes, but women tend to be humble and shy about what they taste and know. Don’t be afraid to play in the sandbox too.

All us gals were likely raised thinking all beer tasted roughly like the mass lagers on the market. At one point in your drinking career, you have a beer

LA Craft Brew Queens

I have never felt that being a woman has held me back in anything. Maybe

Sometimes. What I’ve realized is that operating a brewery involves so many other important roles besides making the beer. You can make the best beer in the world, but if there’s no one to analyze it, market it, sell it, count the beans, or spread the word, you are not going to be in business very long. Those are the jobs without barriers. In LA and beyond, the women I know in the craft beer business are all energetic, creative, tenacious, and probably don’t think twice about jumping into a historically maledominated career.

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LA Craft Brew Queens

PHOTOS OF EAGLE ROCK BREWERY BY CASEY WINKLEMAN

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HALLIE BEAUNE The Beer Chicks; Beer Sommelier + Co-Author of “The Naked Pint: An Unadulterated Guide to Craft Beer” and “The Naked Brewer: Fearless Homebrewing Tips, Tricks, & Rule-breaking Recipes” Where / when did your interest in craft beer (or just beer) start and what encouraged you to make it your profession? I fell for beer while working at Father’s Office in Santa Monica. That’s where Christina Perozzi and I met, she hired me actually. You have to learn everything there is to know about beer to work there, and once I tasted all of the variety of flavors beer has to offer and studied the history I just wanted to know more and more...and drink more and more. What has your experience been like as an actively working woman involved in the beer industry?

Have you personally noticed the increase of women working and participating in the craft brew industry? Particularly in Los Angeles? Definitely, now that women feel included in the conversation that used to be very ‘bro’ they are passionately bringing their palates (often superior palates) to this world. Women know their hop varietals and beer styles, they are excited about pairing beer with food, and are even the ones educating the men in their lives. What about female consumers? Have you noticed an increase in female beer drinkers throughout your career?

Yes, that’s come along with the love that the foodie world has for beer right now. As women are hitting the newest, cutting edge restaurants and seeing the focus on beer as opposed to wine, they are finding the beers that they appreciate. Women are the primary purchasers of every household, so it’s important for the beer community to reach out to them. That’s what we’ve always tried to do with our website, thebeerchicks.com and with our books. Do you have any advice for women who are interested in getting into the beer business? First find your passion, taste beer and follow your palate. It always helps to work in a beer bar for at least a portion of your career, having that one on one with the general public is essential to learning about how to speak about beer. Then working with/at a brewery is important so you understand what it takes to

make great beer. We as women have a unique perspective on beer and ability to fight stereotypes and find a beer for everyone just because we are female in a male-dominated world. It’s like sitting down at the poker table, you have an advantage because statistically men assume you don’t know how to play... Why do you think it’s important for women to be an active part of this industry? We have the best palates, we have a history of brewing - women in the past were often the brewers of the home. We fight stereotypes not just regarding women and men, but regarding beer styles, we tend to have a love of more different styles, not just super hoppy but earthy, malty, citrusy, dry , sour etc.... It’s empowering to be a woman with beer knowledge. I never tire of seeing someone assume I don’t know anything about beer and then dropping some serious beer knowledge on them.

LA Craft Brew Queens

Recently I was at a tasting event and I went to the ladies’ room and it was empty, if you catch my drift.... But it’s changing. Christina and I got used to being the only women at beer events,

but that’s generally not the case anymore. There are some wonderful dynamic women who are professional brewers, own breweries, write about beer like we do. It’s inspiring.

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ARJUNA NEUMAN Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane, that’s why he has two passports. He is a writer and artist, as well as co-founder of the research collective PS1010. Find him this year in Beirut. ANNA VALDEZ Anna Valdez is a visual artist living in Northern California. She received her MFA from Boston University in 2013. She works primarily as a painter, and animator. To see more of her work visit: annavaldez.com. JORDAN PEDERSEN Jordan Pedersen is a hip-hop writer and budding unionista who moved to Los Angeles from Chicago in April of 2013. His work has been published by MTV Hive, Complex Magazine, HyperVocal, the Good Men Project, and The House Next Door. He’s currently interning in the communications department at UNITE HERE Local 11. JULIE NIEMI Julie Niemi is a writer, editor, and cultural savant living in Los Angeles, although she often travels away from LA to feel the colder seasons. In January 2013, she and three other women had the bright idea to start VIA Publication. CASEY WINKLEMAN Casey Winkleman is a writer, editor, and photographer exploring and living in Los Angeles. She cofounded VIA Publication in 2013.

MOSKOWITZ Moskowitz is an artist living and working in Los Angeles.

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CLAIRE BOUTELLE Claire Boutelle is a designer from the Midwest. You could call her an object enthusiast. She co-founed VIA Publication in 2013. ALLY HASCHE Ally Hasche is a writer, music enthusiast, and co-founder of VIA Publication. She is currently studying art history and loving Los Angeles. RACHEL WOLFE Rachel Wolfe is an American photographer. Classically trained in piano, vocals and dance as a child, she became a photographer while studying Interior Design and Advertising. She completed a Bachelor of Art, yoga certification and is now a MFA candidate at Otis College of Art & Design. Rachel’s photographic and writing work has been nationally and internationally published, exhibited and collected including Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Brazil and Italy. TRACY JEANNE ROSENTHAL Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal is a pop culture parasite. Some of her writing is online. Some of it is stuck in fan mail to Rihanna or in hate mail to Lacan. Sometimes she lectures at galleries or does performances at conferences. She likes orange lilies. ZAC TOMASZEWSKI Zac Tomaszewski is an artist and writer based in his native Los Angeles and Oslo, Norway, where he studied towards an MFA at the National Academy of Art. His art writing has been published in the LA-based journals Whole Beast Rag and, now, VIA Publication. His work can be seen online at zactomaszewski.com.

ERON RAUCH Eron Rauch is a Los Angeles based artist who works with photography, books, essays, drawings and installations to explore the relevance and interconnection of the shadowy regions that linger just at the ever-shifting borders of the traditional fine art world and the American media landscape. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2006 has been a member of the Creative Underground Los Angeles collective since December 2012. For more visit www.eronrauch.com. LOWELL HEFLIN After briefly considering a career in theoretical physics, Lowell Heflin decided the surest route to altering time and space could be achieved through the written word and the stray vibrations of sung songs echoing out of the American lean-to. According to his Mother, He is “the best musician alive.” JOEL DEAN Joel Dean (b. Atlanta, GA 1986) lives and works in Oakland, California where he co-directs an artist-run space called Important Projects. JUSTIN FISET Justin Fiset is a Los Angeles based artist who works primarily in photography. His work has been shown nationally and published international, most recently in the German photography quarterly Der Greif (Issue #6). Recent shows include Looking at the Land at The RISD Museum of Art, and The Photo Review: Best in Show at Gallery 1401, Philadelphia. He also works as an independent consultant, working with private collectors of photography to curate and manage their collections.

FOUNDING EDITORS Ally Hasche Julie Niemi Casey Winkleman Claire Boutelle ART DIRECTION + DESIGN Claire Boutelle VIA PUBLICATION VIA Publication is a biannual print magazine and online platform that documents visual art, music, and food culture within contemporary LA life. We publish and archive original content brought forth by our staff and contributors. PRINTING Wayne @ Printing Dynamics in Walnut, CA SPECIAL THANKS To Maura Lucking, Joe Conte, Dante Fried Chicken, David Bell, Pat Elifritz, and to everyone whose generous contributions allowed us to print Issue 02 CONNECT WEB www.viapublication.com TWITTER/ INSTAGRAM @viapublication EMAIL info@viapublication.com MAIL PO Box 862287 Los Angeles, CA 90086 COVER PHOTO By Rachel Wolfe, from ESPLA

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Contributors

SAMMY SAIYAVONGSA Sammy lives in Echo Park, Los Angeles and works as an editorial research assistant. She originally hails from the Midwest where she studied journalism in Chicago.

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