The underside of freight cars smells like wet dust. The cold metal rail digs into your knees while you hide between tanker cars, waiting in darkness for a pickup truck to pass. The sound of tires on asphalt grows closer as the truck passes, its headlights flashing from behind a tanker car’s wheels.

Jaber, a graffiti artist, waits patiently, then picks up his backpack clanging with spray cans, affixes his paint mask, and says, “I think we’re cool, let’s go.”

He walks quickly across an empty track and grabs the tank car’s ladder. Hand over hand, Jaber climbs atop the black tanker. The pickup truck is nowhere to be seen, but the Port of Long Beach is in full view. Red flames burst from smokestacks set against a sea of lights, and freight cars line the tracks like steel sausage links on rails. It’s an industrialized version of hell, half Blade Runner and half Hieronymus Bosch, but for Jaber and the countless freight writers across the world, the train yard is their home.

“When I’m out here, I really get time to think,” says Jaber, who gave his graffiti name but did not want to be further identified. He climbs off the tanker and returns to a mural he has started on a primer-gray boxcar. He sets out his cans in a line, looks at the series of lines and angles scrawled across the car. Over the next 45 minutes Jaber sprays colors and designs that are difficult to see in the darkness.

He is creating a “burner,” a multicolored piece that spans most of the boxcar. Burners are a distant relative to hobo codes, the markings written on freight trains by train-hopping hobos of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those codes are some of the earliest forms of graffiti in California, written in coal on trains and under the oldest bridges, where traveling hobos slept.

For most of his life Jaber has walked along the tracks to tag his signature image — a cartoonish profile (possibly a self-portrait) — on the underbelly of trains and on industrial complexes. Now in his early 30s, Jaber makes his living with his art, selling canvases of his works, live painting at events, and working in the film industry.

When he has the time, he returns to his roots in the train yard. He never hits a “holy roller,” a car carrier named for the small holes in its metal walls, which would allow paint to penetrate and damage the autos. He also is careful not to cover train identification numbers or other markings essential to the rail officials.

“If you do it right, they don’t really care and your piece can run for years, all across the country,” Jaber says.

He was right. Earlier that day, Jaber spotted a car he had marked in 2007. “I remember that very night,” he said, smiling slightly at the sight of his old friend.

Los Angeles city officials are trying to end freight writing. In August, City Attorney Carmen Trutanich told the L.A. Times about an “end of days scenario” for graffiti crews, in which injunctions would make it illegal for taggers to hang out together. It’s the same tactic the city uses on gang members.

“If you want to tag, be prepared to go to jail,” Trutanich said, “And I don’t have to catch you tagging. I can just catch you … with your homeboys.”

A spokesperson from Trutanich’s office tells L.A. Weekly that the plan is just in “an exploratory phase,” and his office claims that 32 million square feet of graffiti were removed in 2007-2008 at a cost of more than $7 million.

Like Jaber, many graffiti writers are not “homeboys,” and they don’t tag over city murals or private property. With the evaporation of school art programs in underserved communities and the inaccessibility of high-priced art programs — where an MFA is almost always required — the wall, billboard or freight train presents a better opportunity for artists to get seen.

The periodic fetishization of graffiti by the art establishment — from Basquiat and Banksy to Shepard Fairey — sends the message that street art is more than a hobby. It can become a lucrative and important branch of America’s folk-art lineage.

Union Pacific railroad has a different view. The painting of freight cars is illegal and unsafe, and violators are subject to arrest by Union Pacific police, says Tom Lange, communications director.

Jaber knows all of that. But it doesn’t stop him.

“That’s it,” he says of his work, moving back from the boxcar. He holds up his camera and takes a picture. In the flash, Jaber’s mural comes into view: the jagged blue letters unfolding like feathers or vines, the imperial-purple waves crashing behind the text, and black script reading “Lost Angel.”

Then darkness returns. Jaber puts the camera in his backpack and leaves the train yard and his burner. Tomorrow the train might be gone, but in the unsaid mantra of the freight writer: What you create comes back to you.

Photographs and text by Drew Tewksbury

from L.A. Weekly, Nov. 4th, 2009

*

Related posts:

1. Hot wheels: Best Movie Cars
2. Earthless/ Psychic Paramount
3. Monster Truck Parking Lot

It’s 11 a.m. on a Saturday. Good morning.

Bassist Nick D’Itri leans on his amp near a broken-looking organ crouched in the corner. Guitarist Greg Buensuceso runs through a lick in front of his Orange amplifier. At the center of the room, Brandon Pierce sits behind his drum set and trash-talks Maranga as we walk in. Maranga wastes no time getting started. He strokes his long, reddish beard once, straps on his guitar and rips into the strings. What comes out is the Southern rock–brushed “Come Down Halo,” from the band’s recently released split 7-inch single with Sea of Air. Singer Sam James Velde, former member of rock outfit Bluebird, shakes his hair and lifts one hand to the rafters while the other clutches the mic stand. Here, in the privacy of their practice space, they rip through the Allman Brothers–tinged dual guitar lines and growling bass of “Choose Your Side,” and the rowdy, roadhouse blues of “Good Bye Gone.” “We sped up too much on that one,” Maranga tells the other guys, most of whom were friends from their high school days in Thousand Oaks.

They’re halfway though this Saturday-morning practice session, and the guys have a lot of work ahead of them. Buensuceso also has to get to his grandmother’s birthday party soon, so in these few hours, they’ve got to get it right. Night Horse doesn’t sound rusty, but it’s been a while since the members have all rehearsed together, and one of their biggest shows quickly approaches: Sunset Junction. It’s a crucial moment offering serious exposure for the down-home rockers, a chance to spread their sound to an audience as yet untapped.

Night Horse’s style is familiar but indiscernible; their cocksure barroom vocals and guitar-solo tradeoffs would be at home at CBGB (R.I.P.). “We’re first and foremost a rock & roll band, but we try not to be too derivative,” says Velde. If Night Horse has any derivations, they come from their label, Tee Pee Records, the New York–based outfit that curates the finest in no-gimmick, back-to-basics rock bands.

Photo by Drew Tewksbury
_

Founded in 1995 by Tony Presedo, Tee Pee earned high marks for early, seminal releases from drone rockers Sleep and High on Fire, along with weirdos Brian Jonestown Massacre. Presedo parted ways with the label in August 2008 (he now heads up the culinary mash-up Territory BBQ + Records). Under the direction of Steve Dolcemaschio, the “almost-24-year-old” (as he tells me) general manager, the label has cultivated its lineup into an L.A.-centric list heavy on the psychedelic tip. “We are trying to make a label that puts out good music, for the sake of the music,” Dolcemaschio says. Last year he was an intern at Tee Pee, and now he runs the label. The boutique imprint has a staff of four in New York, but supports a roster of eight bands in L.A., six of which were signed or re-signed in 2009. From the Western flavor of Spindrift and the dark, postapocalyptic haunt of label newcomers Black Math Horseman to Maranga and Pierce’s other band, the epic wall of rock experimentalists, Ancestors, Tee Pee’s latest signings are collectively infused with layers and sonic textures usually absent from the endless noodling of some stoner effusium.

Last July, Tee Pee brought together many of its bands for the first annual New Weird America Fest at L.A.’s Nomad Gallery. The show, named after the “new weird America” freak folk-musical phylum that bubbled up around 2003, in many ways marked a new moment in Los Angeles music — or at least a reimagining of movements past. It had been years since Arthur Fest brought the finest experimental, psychedelic and folk musics to L.A.; FYF Fest, although presenting a phenomenal lineup, appealed more to Vice Magazine enthusiasts and American Apparel fans. New Weird America represented a realigning of the new psychedelic sounds with roots in Los Angeles’ far-out history.

“It reminded me of being in the desert, of going to see Kyuss out at a generator party, and that kind of community,” desert sage and songwriter Imaad Wasif told me while at indie radio station KXLU. The Coachella Valley native, with family roots in India, played the New Weird America Fest and looked the part of this burgeoning psych scene. His matchstick legs were shrink-wrapped into jeans, his long, wavy hair fell onto the shoulders of his gray military-looking jacket. At times, he speaks like a mystic. “It’s all about creating this cycle of birth, death and growth,” Wasif says about the spiritual nature of his upcoming album, The Voidist (out October 13), which melds melodic acoustic strumming with swirling psych breakdowns. “I didn’t realize it as a kid, but how my parents raised me, with our food and Indian lifestyle, was almost like a mystic in India,” Wasif says. “All of my songs have an embodiment of a character, which is me, and this oracle. I believe in this androgyny within myself.”

L.A. has long been home to psychedelic spirit; Sky Saxon and the Source family are testaments to this iconoclastic scene. Tee Pee Records reconnects with this heritage. “L.A.’s history with the fringe and psychedelic stretches from Topanga Canyon to the Sunset Strip; hair metal and other genres just derailed it,” Spindrift’s songwriter, Kirpatrick Thomas, once told me (while wrapped in a sleeping bag in their unruly, smelly tour van). It’s true: psych is hardly new, but it’s been a while since the scene has been this organized. As Night Horse and Tee Pee’s other L.A. bands gain momentum, though, it’s misleading to call it a comeback. It’s a creeping tsunami. A (not so) silent swell of tuned-in rockers all riding the same vibration. On any given night in L.A., someone from the Tee Pee label is onstage, in the crowd, or perhaps crashing on your couch — at least until it’s time to get up and practice.

*

Photographs and Text By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, August 26, 2009

Related posts:

1. Cold War Kids’ Lukewarm Friday Night at the Wiltern
2. Interview: Voxhaul Broadcast
3. Death – …For the Whole World to See

If sequel mania and action overload has worn you thin, film festivals offer an antidote to the big budget blockbusters that trounce theaters during summertime. When it comes to film festivals, we know about the usual suspects: There’s Tribeca, Sundance, and South by Southwest, to name a few. In the summer, many critics look to Europe to enjoy the fruits of international auteurs, but some of the most unique festivals can be found Stateside. As an homage to the homeland, we present this list of American film festivals that are worth checking out as the weather starts to sizzle.

Seattle International Film Festival

The Place: Seattle, Washington

The Dates: May 21-June 14

The Deal: With nearly an entire month of movies, the Seattle International Film Festival presents one of the longest film series in the U.S. Featuring worldwide documentaries, short films, animation, and more, the series unveils the newest efforts by foreign and domestic filmmakers. In addition, the SIFF has an ace in the hole: a scavenger hunt! Eat that, Cannes.

http://www.seattlefilm.com/

Brooklyn International Film Festival

The Place: Brooklyn, NY

The Dates: June 5-14

The Deal: Contrary to what Robert De Niro may lead us to believe, Manhattan isn’t New York City’s only repository for cutting edge films. The Brooklyn International Film Festival, now in its 12th year, showcases the works of underdogs and future stars in the borough that’s much more than just a hipster haven.

http://www.wbff.org/

Cinevegas

The Place: Vegas, baby

The Dates: June 10-15

The Deal: Las Vegas is a city on the edge, where party animals and cash-seeking opportunists collide in this desert locale-turned-money-throwing-Mecca. The Cinevegas Film Festival is no different, as established filmmakers moonlighting from Los Angeles and up-and-coming directors hope to hit the jackpot.

http://www.cinevegas.com

Silverdocs

The Place: Washington, D.C.

The Dates: June 15-22

The Deal: Truth can be stranger than fiction, but the AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival in Washington, D.C. highlights true stories that illuminate the activities of our communities and the world at large. The festival presents the finest in documentaries from around the globe and provides a world vision much more real than a mediascape dominated by “reality” television.

http://silverdocs.com/

Topanga Film Festival

The Place: Topanga Canyon, CA

The Dates: August 6-9

The Deal: Located in a winding canyon just minutes north of Hollywood, Topanga Canyon is known for beautiful views, avant-hippie celebrity residents, and a film festival that highlights the finest in indie and experimental film. The homegrown festival started five years ago in founders Sara and Urs Baur’s backyard and has grown into an event that not only provides an idyllic backdrop for outsider cinema, but also celebrates the psychedelic spirit of the Topanga community.

http://topangafilmfestival.com/

LA Shorts Fest

The Place: Los Angeles

The Dates: August 15-21

The Deal: Short films offer the perfect remedy to the peripatetic viewing habits of Generation ADD. The LA Shorts Fest calls itself “fast food for the eyes,” and for some emerging directors, the festival can be a chance to fast track their careers. From experimental animation to creative commercials, this short film festival gives famous actors and directors a chance to push their craft to the limit in these movie haikus.

http://www.lashortsfest.com

Found Footage Festival

The Place: On tour across North America

The Dates: All summer long

The Deal: Film festivals are all about showing great stuff, right? Well, not all of them. The Found Footage Festival takes pride in showing the most bizarre, hilarious, and slightly stupid videos discovered from around the world. From self-help vignettes to instructional videos such as “Inside and Outside Custodial Duties,” the touring festival will undoubtedly shock, embarrass, and amuse select American cities with the absurdity of the mundane.

http://www.myspace.com/foundfootagefestival

By Drew Tewksbury

from Artist Direct, May 5th, 2009

*

Related posts:

1. Summer Bishil
2. Battle in Seattle
3. Stuart Townsend and Martin Henderson

Shawn Mortensen, the visionary photographer who captured countless iconic images of artists, celebrities and musicians, died this week.

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Shawn when I worked at Flaunt Magazine. He came into our office to talk about shooting for our 90′s issue. As he leaned against the wall in the art department he began to tell me about his life. He told me about photographing Snoop Dogg at 19, meeting a young Beck, and introducing Rage Against the Machine to the Zapatistas, who he met in Chiapas, Mexico. Mortensen looked fucking cool as he leaned in the corner near the layout wall, chatting with Todd, the art director.  He was tall with a pin-striped business shirt opened slightly, a necklace of what appeared to be a silver dragon’s tooth dangled loosely.  His sensible leather dress shoes had no laces, and later he confessed he got them from some designer for free. He quoted Dolly Parton, “some people pay a lot of money to look this cheap.” But Mortensen did not look cheap, he had the hands callused with experience, and a salt and pepper beard just starting to grow on his face. I was engrossed in his casual eloquence, confident gesticulations and peripatetic gray eyes as he painted a picture of being a “cross pollinator of creativity” in the 1990′s.

Twenty minutes later, I was leaning against the wall, as Shawn’s story tied up. We asked him if he wanted to share his story on the pages of Flaunt and he agreed. He asked me what he should say. I told him, “Just tell me everything.” From his sporadic ideas, I figured I could whittle down his piece to about 200 words and get some captions for photographs.

At exactly 1:45 a.m. on a Friday morning, I got my first email from Shawn.  The subject read: ” title: Movements in the Blink of an Eye.” When I woke up at eight, I had gotten two more from him, one from 2:29 a.m. and the other at 3:39 a.m.  There were more to come, and by Monday afternoon, his final email would become 22 pages fragmented text, arbitrary punctuation, sentence fragments, open-faced notes to himself, and moments of beautiful clarity.

We gave his text a huge spread in Flaunt Issue 88, and I spent hours with his words, editing and making sense of his sprawling, freeform life. This was in 2007, but I knew Shawn was giving me an obituary, a living epitaph that he wrote himself, patching together his life quilt and sewing up his incredible experiences.

What follows is Shawn’s original text, which he sent me over that series of days in 2007. I’ve preserved his typos and formatting, hoping that–like the Bukowski quote he opens with–his own avalanche of words and ideas could be a poem of its own.

This is his final draft.

Shawn, you will be missed.

-Drew Tewksbury

*
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Movements in the Blink of an Eye

THE LAST SHOT

here we are, once again, the last drink, the last
poem– decades of this splendid luck– another drunken
a.m., and not on the drunktank floor tonight waiting for
the black pimp to get off the phone so i can put through my one
allowed call (so many of those a.m.s too) it took
me a long time to find the most interesting person to
drink with; myself, like this, now reaching to my left
for the last glass of the Blood of the
Lamb.
-Charles Bukowski

FRIDAYS 11p.m. – 4 a.m.
660 Heliotrope (at Melrose)
On the reverse was a Xeroxed close-up image of a hand with a skull ring, a cigarette, & a mug of beer -Keith Richard’s hands to be precise.

This would be the innocuous begining invitation to an underground arty party for the wildest sides L.A. had to offer in’88- ’89. I was an Art Student at U.S.C. & was looking to create what Joseph Beuys called ‘Social Sculpture’. Egalitarian to the extreme, my crew & I pulled in the most ecclectic crowd since the Star Wars Cantina- MIXED of Club Kids-Artists; Keith Haring,Jean-Michel Basquiat, Koivisto, HAZE, Fab5Freddy, DOZE – musicians; Public Image Ltd.,Beastie Boys, Fishbone, Joe Strummer, Keith Richards, Wasted Youth, Ice T, Flavor Flav, Chilli Peppers, Brat Pack Actors like Rob Lowe {the week of his sex scandle},Matt Dillon, River Phoenix, Mickey Rourke,Ione Skye, NYC Club Scene makers; Eric Goode, Serge Becker, Haoui Montaug, James St.James, Bruce Weber & Herb Ritts Models; Tony Ward, Lisa RosanaDetail’s NightLife Columnist Stephan Saban, Tim Kelly, Club Kids, Punks, Vatos, Gang Bangers, Drag Queens, Rap Crews YOUFUCKING NAME IT . . . AND the MOST AGGRESSIVE MUSIC {N.W.A. was new,punk, rap, funk, disco} ALL in One … One on One … Never too much of ONE thing, nor of ONE crowd AND ALWAYS ON THE MOVE .

People came to DANCE & PARTY rather than to be seen. Each equal to the next. Stars OR stripes, EVERYONE given the same shake. Mostly we’d rent old playhouses & it was by word of mouth. By the time we got RAIDED, I was told LAST SHOT was Public Enemy #1 on the L.A.Vice Squad hit  list …kinda dumb considering it was literally Technique turn tables, kegs of beer, & a low key “speakeasy”vibe…

but we were HOT in the press.  Typically staff would quit ‘cos I’d let everyone in FREE. Not a den of
iniquity, but rather a no man’s land where people had a laugh. It was sexy. You could hook up, make out & contrary to our “shooting imagery” on flyers – we never had a fight. We even threw my 23rd birthday party in the LA River under the 6th Street bridge…

push came to shove we lost our spot, BUT THE SHOW MUST GO ON ! Mixing with so many different people consistently definately gave me the confidence to venture out in my later artwork.

It was at these end of the line parties that I started making Polaroids for fun. To document the diversiy , the verve & the mayhem of someone driving thru the hall on a motorbike – or the complete dynamism of ALL these dispargent people ‘getting along’. I was heavy into Art & Film History in university. I most admired the ZEITGEIST SURFERS like Alfred Steiglitz, Robert Frank, Andy Warhol, & Dick Avedon. Somehow it seemed funny to me being taught in school that Steiglitz fought for photography to be recognized as art in the early 20th century & now the U.S. Government were engaging in the Culture Wars against the N.E.A. & their funding of photo based artworks of Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Wojnarowicz & more.

Not only was the government declaring WAR on American Art, but everywhere were signs that THE PARTY WAS OVER … or more disturbing THESE PHOTOS WERE ABOUT PEOPLE WHO WERE DYING . A.I.D.S. hit nightlife & art like a hurricane. Poignantly, my 1st night out to celebrate my move to NYC I hit Eric Goode’s club M.K . . I saw about every artist & scenemaker I’d wanna met in NYC, but it took some time to realize the club was having a memorial that night for Cookie Meuller who’d died of A.I.D.S. .

I’d dreamed of the Warhol New York, but with Andy gone it was like someone stole the Disco Ball & the electricity from the party. My friend Keith Haring died at the start of the decade. Man – IT WAS LIKE A DIRGE & the Government was being run by IDIOTS unwilling to address the obvious. Pretty soon we’d be marching into some dumb WAR that looked like a Mini-Series on CNN with FLASHING GRAPHICS, but what about the dead at home ?! To be 24 years old & have peers dying seemed hard to fathom. I began my journey of finding my art first assisting people who worked at Warhol’s Factory & doing some working part-time for a leader of Act-Up. Even the tempo of the Art World became like a DIRGE. Riding my bike around NYC, I’d be mezmerized by the profound, melancholy & brilliantly concise billboard art installations of Felix-Gonzales Torres; a billboard of an empty unmade bed above Sheridan Square or in Chelsea’s former glory holes.

Keith Haring murals confronting the crack cocaine epidemic or in the clubs like some hyroglyphs of an ancient culture, but I was smoking a joint with him just 6 months ago at Last Shot. The lighting bolts of brilliant clarity charging from the mouth of David Wojnarowicz. Time was URGENT & fleeting. Each day seemed precious & the ordinary privations of being a struggling young artist were beyond a fear about rent, or your next meal, but of who would be next to get sick or conversely to sink into the gaping despair of drugs that made the Lower East Side seem like the Grand Canyon. This side of the divide is heroin, that side is all crack. The most infuriating display in this battlezone was the blatant gentrification & Tompkin’s Square Park blazed.

In the streets you’d hear jeeps blaring Public Enemy’s Fight The Power or KRS1′s My Philosophy. The Eighties were OVER. Time to do SOMETHING, say SOMETHING, mean SOMETHING … it was no longer about fight for your right to party. So many young men & women of all colors were dying IT WAS CRAZY, As an artist I wanted to encounter & portray  the great minds of my time,but they seemed to be dying as fast as they could be sold.

A famous British art dealer cornered me in my boss’ studio. He knew my circle of friends were close to Jean-Michel & Keith and he put considerable pressure on to elist me in prying by buying the work from a coterie of people with romantic affiliations with them. Gave me the creeps ! It was about that time that I realized the New York I was in was out of my means.

SO I decided to hit the road . Do the couch tour of college friends while building my first portfolio.
Everywhere you looked & each distant echo seemed to point to a polar shift or a fissure.

I barley had a portfolio half filled with prints, but I made a pact with myself – over a stable home – or
even staedy meals – I was gonna GO FOR IT – blow what little cash I had left & make my way back to LA for a summer. Save & then find my footing out in the greater world.

In the early Nineties, musically, the most DANGEROUS band in America was N.W.A . . In 1991 the rumor was that they were splitting too. Everything on the radio you’d hear were “hair bands” or Oldies.
Then I got a call from an old college friend who was now editing the Source magazine. Ice Cube had quit N.W.A. & was going solo. He needed someone to photograph him for the cover. Would I be down ?
HELL YEAH was my reply ! No only my 1st assignment, but A COVER & CUBE ?!! He was THE voice of rage outta N.W.A. . My Mom had spent part of her early childhood in Compton not far from where I’d come to meet Cube, the Lynch Mob & a fellow U.S.C. grad  director John Singleton . It’s an attarctive looking area of palm trees & ’50′s homes. New York editors would always be mad that I’d broughta rapper to a suburb. The legendary violence comes at night. SO in a way it was like getting my 1st shot with the home team’s heavy hitter. Not only was Cube dropping an album, but was staring in a film, “Boyz”N The Hood”. When 1st being introduced to Cube he gave me a skeptical look & asked,  ” Are you shooting this for Elle or VOGUE or something?”. I said no, that I was a contributor to the Source. Cube’s response was curt & to the point, ‘Good, ‘cos to Elle or VOGUE I say 5 minutes!’.

Beyond my friends that worked at Def Jam or doing clubs in NYC – hip hop or RAP as it was on the West Coast was a grass roots phenomina. It was like a Mom & Pop shop. Two years later, again on assignment for the Source I met up with Tupac Shakur after making arrangements with his Mother & manager Afeni Shakur. As for my work, well to put it bluntly, no one else seemed that interested in taking photos of the rappers although mainstream media loved to cover any perceived menace to society or whip up hysteria. I was stunned that here artists like N.W.A. were selling as many millions as Guns-N-Roses, yet no one wanted near them. Even the record companies reps would not turn up for a shoot.

MY approach towards these artists were as if I were working with Bob Dylan or any other folk artists.
Having grown up with hip hop & punk rock, I saw little to no difference. I was determind to create imagery as thought provoking, confrontational & as authentic as their words. As the artists & even the genre was just emerging, Ihad room to be bold. The artists liked the ideas of creating something realistic, memorable, or even cinematic. That being said, these dudes were under considerable scrutiny from the FBI, LAPD, & the Media.

My intial portraits of Ice Cube, Dr.Dre, Snoop & Tupac would be as inspired by my academic education as much as my imagination.

I had these ideas of historical portraiture, where an individual can define a mood in the culture or
movement.

I have a great passion for reggae music & decided to pursue my first in depth reportage or photo-essay effort in the projects of Kingston Jamaica. It was a seminal time in the music & would later greatly influence American Pop tatste. the home-spun fashion
there is astonishing.

WHen I returned to America Nirvana were set to release NEVERMIND. Although an avid fan of indie rock, I was blown away by the power & songs of the album . It was obvious that a youthquake was gonna be imminnet ! It later became an alsmost comic common occurence when working in paris documenting Fashion week. Editors would approach me as if I was stepping off a podium; why is your hair long ? I LOVE the ripped denim ! What IS ‘GRUNGE’?? To see it immitated  in American VOGUE was almost too odd as to be CREEPY. The one refreshing element of that fashion hysteria was the elevation of a charming young model I’d met in LA named Kate Moss.

She was so AGAINST TYPE & it’s almost hard to describe HOW her elevation really shattered a certain physical ideal to that time.

Around this time a group of my friends & I began to collaborate on what would become Comedy Central’s 1st TV SHOW called HIGH OCTANE. The idea was a sorta SOOPED UP ride through pop culture with a dry humor & an inside joke. Sofia Coppola & Zoey Cassavettes were the hosts driving a red pontiac GTO & interviewing Keanu Reeves , Naomi Cambell & driving monster trucks.
spike Jonze , Roman Coppola,Dewey Nicks & I Directed segements. I also played a kind of punk rock cub reporter flung unto the fashion week whirlwind in pursuit of my actual former mechanic Model Jenny Schimizu. I later made absurd interviews with Karl Lagerfeld, Andre Leon Talley, Beck & The Supermodels.

It was my 1st shot at direting & I had a laugh doing it … even dropped the camera mid-interview as a
result.
The great spirit of that mid-Ninties moment was just a sense of A TOTAL CHANGING of the GUARD. Nirivana’s videos got funnier as their fame got meteoric. Designers like John Galiano, Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela & Marc Jacobs seemed to have arrived & were there to stay … even if it seemed a bit silly to see Naomi in a thrift store looking sude jacket & beanie
just moments after  Versace GLAMAZONIA.

My work has always been inspired by the future & the point many people seem to miss is the future is happening NOW. It’s easy to poke fun a fashion as it’s ever changing. My interest is in what it’s themes or trends are communicating about culture, class, & as is most important to broadening of ethnic representation & progress away from  a INSANE body tyrrany. Let me state the obvious here – altho’ I rarely employ retouching  in my work – it would astound MEN as well as WOMEN the degree to which event so called “fitness”mags EXTENSIVELY RETOUCH their subjects ! WHY create a HOW TO guide on fitness at all then. OK, maybe fitness mags could employ some spce to home retouching for holiday snaps.

I travel & consider the growth of Globalization a defining element to my work. To hear people rave about Biggie in Nigeria. Hearing Tupac out of a city bus in South Africa or to even discover a massive audience for hip hop in Mongolia is astonishing. People cringe at this reference, but it’s representative – Paris Hilton is GLOBAL-A-GA-GA !

She’s a huge phenominon. She has my sympathy. The more they attack her, the more I like her. The kinda disorientating barometer of this decade is the celebrity degrees of non-seperation. Somehow they start to morph into each other. The truly funny is how parking lot & shopping trip paparazzi are THE BLOOD of the Fashion Industry.

My next thought is then – how does that help or hinder jobs & developement in Jamaica or Malaysia or Mexico.

Many of the casual or streetwear styles I documented throughout my work have become a comepletely global phenominon. You can exit a cab at random in New York, London or Hong Kong & discover kids wearing the same shoe, hat, clothing brand & rocking to the same rhythm. AMAZING. Although my human rights work has looked to the shadow of globalization on poverty & developement, my hope is the growth on an interrelated prosperity.

The Nineties also launched the SMEAR of SWEATSHOP LABOR. Kathy Lee Gifford ? Imitation of Christ ? Imitation of Imitation of Christ ? All fashionista parodies aside, WHO DO WE ELECT TO define FairTrade? WHen do we concede to the big conceit in our back yard?

Who defines the standards ? This question of AUTHORITY is our contemporary challenge. WHO is the AUTHORITY on Global Human Rights ? HOW reliable are our AUTHORITIES? WHEN do we claim our own AUTHORITY over the critics, over the legislature, over the church ?

Perhaps this idea of AUTHORITY is why marketers & industry are again BOWING to the VOX POPULI of WORD of MOUTH.

-Shawn Mortensen 2008
Photos by Shawn Mortensen

Related posts:

1. Interview: Cameron Diaz in London
2. Aaron Cohen: The Slave Hunter
3. Images for the Post-Video Age

The golden pocket watch drops from the hypnotist’s white-gloved hand. The timepiece dangles before the caped mystic swings it like a pendulum in front of the subject’s face. “You are getting very sleepy,” the hypnotist says, as the audience watches the subject become a human marionette. Will he crawl like a hedgehog or cluck like a chicken? Will a dark secret be revealed?

Hypnosis holds a special place in the American pop culture lexicon, whether used as a plot device or in sensational live shows. It’s a mind-controlling agent in “The Manchurian Candidate” and the catalyst to ultimate freedom in “Office Space.” Hypnosis is the key to unlocking the human mind.

Or is it?

It’s up to Los Angeles’ late-night crowd to decide when Kevin Stone — the self-proclaimed Hollywood Hypnotist, a term he has gone so far as to trademark — attempts to cast his spell on clubgoers in a series of Saturday night shows at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood.

Stone’s midnight act takes more from Vegas than vaudeville; he leaves the gloves, cape and watch back in hypnosis history. Instead, Stone saunters onstage clad all in black and pulls the strings of his subjects in a show that brings the weird and the wild out of them.

Well, mostly the wild.

“No one will do anything they wouldn’t normally do while hypnotized,” he says. “But you never know what’s going to happen.”

The setup may be familiar but the outcome, Stone says, is unpredictable. A row of audience members faces the crowd, and Stone embeds suggestions into their minds. When their eyes close and heads drop, the ridiculous spectacle begins. On a recent night, young professionals sleepily disco-danced, a woman’s hands floated in the air (bound with invisible balloons, she believed), and a man searched under his seat for something he misplaced.

“Do you know what happened to your butt?” Stone asked Darrell Johnson.

“I don’t know. It’s just gone,” Johnson replied, dejectedly.

Johnson, a 52-year-old Veterans Affairs hospital employee, became the star of the night as he fell into Stone’s web of hypnosis.

At the show’s conclusion, Stone took a more serious tone, asking participants to think of something they wanted and to let this thought seep into their unconsciousness.

Although Stone flaunts his persona onstage, he says he wants to raise awareness of hypnotherapy’s beneficial effects offstage. “I started off doing sessions in celebrities’ living rooms,” says Stone, whose Beverly Hills office is decorated with clippings and metronomes. “Then it started taking off and turned into the stage show. But I know that hypnotism can work for everyone.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from The Guide, L.A. Times posted/printed April 16, 2009

*

Related posts:

1. Interviews: Vince Vaughn and Comics of “Wild West Comedy Show”
2. The Mountain Goats
3. Suicide – Live 1977 – 1978

Laika was brought to the English-speaking world in a 1953 article in the New York Times. “Moscow Radio last week announced that an animal-carrying satellite soon would be launched… The radio audience was introduced to a ‘small, shaggy dog named Kudryavka,’ which barked into the microphone.” A few days after, Laika—Kudryavka’s nickname, which translates to “barker”—was placed into a small spacecraft.

For Laika, it was to be a one-way flight. Soviet scientists said they poisoned her last ration of food so that she would simply fall asleep instead of starving. (It was later revealed that Laika probably did not live past the lift-off stage.) In 1998, Oleg Gazenko, the scientist who pulled the stray from the Moscow streets, reflected on his experience: “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”

Anitra Menning / Photo by Ryan Schude
-
In a darkened room at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Laika’s portrait stands alone. Framed and oil-painted, it hangs in an exhibition room that toes the line between Victorian salon and Old West funeral parlor. Titled “Lives of Perfect Creatures: Dogs of the Soviet Space Program,” the exhibit displays 10 paintings as a tribute to the dogs used in prototypic space flight.

Housed in an unassuming building in the Los Angeles enclave of Culver City, the Museum of Jurassic Technology challenges the traditional museum. Instead of acting as a source of knowledge, the museum raises more questions than answers: Is it a repository for the obscure, the ephemeral and the unfathomable, encapsulated in a post-modern Victorian salon of the 21st century? Or is it an experiment in the paradoxical and the sublimely wondrous? Perhaps.

If you’re not looking, you may miss it. The strip-mall flotsam of Los Angeles urban sprawl—an In-N-Out Burger, Blockbuster Video and India Sweets & Spices—camouflages the anonymous facade of the museum. From the street, there is little evidence of the museum’s existence; people waiting for the bus turn their backs to the museum’s crimson-and-gold sign. There is nothing extraordinary about it. But inside, the exhibits are as mysterious as the museum’s name. Instead of dinosaur bones, the dark, byzantine halls of the museum display bizarre collections. Often referred to as a cabinet of curiosity, the museum lies somewhere between artistic and historical, narrative and interpretative, and the false and the real.

Around the corner from the gift shop, an automated slide show explains the history of museums. An anonymous voice—the same anonymous voice speaking from museum headsets around the world—calls Noah’s ark the first natural history museum, follows the lineage to the wunderkammers (wonder cabinets) of Renaissance Europe, and culminates with the stodgy institutions of today. The Museum of Jurassic Technology marries the details of established institutions—the placards, carefully lit displays, dioramas—with the mystique of P.T. Barnum’s collection of curios, or maybe a Coney Island freak show.

One room is dedicated to artifacts culled from Los Angeles mobile-home parks, where dioramas depict different trailers in small synthetic habitats. “Tell the Bees: Belief, Knowledge & Hypersymbolic Cognition” displays folk remedies from a prescience America committed to the transformative powers of mice on toast and sewing pins stuck into wooden cemetery gates. “The Eye of the Needle: The Unique World of Microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian” showcases nearly invisible sculptures—only visible by microscope—by the Egyptian ex-pat Sandaldjian.

On the second floor, just adjacent to Laika and her Soviet comrades, the 29-year-old Georgian ex-pat Nanuka Tchitchou sits in the tearoom with her ghostlike Windhound, Tula. Nana, as she likes to be called, serves tea from a 100-year-old samovar, a large coal-heated teapot. She uses only Georgian black tea, which she smuggles back from her home country. Nana and the tearoom complete an interpretive arc that starts with the space dogs and Borzoi Cabinet Theatre, which screens films of slow-motion Soviet rocket launches,and ends in a hot glass of tea with lemon. Nana says she does feel like a part of the museum, and that her tearoom is a place for introspection. “Here, tea always opens up a conversation,” she says.

Nana Tchitchou in the Tula Tea Room / Photo by Ryan Schude
-
The museum is held together by the vision and commitment of a group of artists who breathe their dreams and passions into the collection. “This is one of the only places in the world where you’re not told what to think,” Rachel Portenstein, the commemorative objects curator, says. She puts her hand into a small bowl of water, fishes out a piece of adhesive plastic, and adheres it to a ceramic bowl that will soon be placed into a kiln. She sits on a high stool, surrounded by various ceramics and eclectic ephemera that have collected on the shelves in the museum’s back rooms. Behind her is a plastic model of a Russian rocket; to her right a plaster skull. Whereas the interior of the museum is strictly controlled with theatrical lighting and thick curtains, the private backrooms reveal the parts that keep the museum alive.

Sometimes the museum’s founder, David Wilson, with his white hair and horn-rimmed glasses, will emerge from a storage room still painted green from its time as a coroner’s office. Wilson studied film at CalArts in the 1970s, and his mastery of lighting and optical illusion appear in the Athanasius Kircher exhibit, which displays the ideas of the 17th-century Jesuit thinker. Through a viewing apparatus, holograms appear inside each ornately constructed environment, revealing an image that was previously invisible.

“The learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar – guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life”
- Charles Willson Peale

Like the Kircher exhibit, the museum began as collection of Wilson’s ideas. Founded in 1989, the museum grew as enthusiasts donated their collections and expertise to Wilson. In 1995, writer Lawrence Weschler wrote the book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, which brought the museum to the public’s attention. In 2001, Wilson won a MacArthur grant, more commonly known as a “genius grant.”

For those who tend to the museum, the answers still don’t come easy. Since she started at the museum in 2001, finance and development director Anitra Menning says that her view of the museum has changed. It is an ever-evolving piece of conceptual art, she says, and somewhere between Laika’s portrait, mice on toast, and even Nana and Tula in the tearoom, the museum forever orbits the outer edge of the ordinary, challenging the way we perceive the world. “Lately, I have been thinking about the motto of the museum,” she says. “It states, ‘The learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar; guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.’ Here you’re not forced, but you’re guided along. This has made me think a lot about the additive nature of learning and how learning is like a house of cards. To build the house of cards, you always have to find a card to lean against.”
*
By Drew Tewksbury / Photos by Ryan Schude

Published Swindle Magazine, Issue 19, Jan. 2009

Museum of Jurassic Technology Website

Lawrennce Weschler’s NPR Sound
Portrait of the MJT and David Wilson

Athanasius Kircher

New York Times Article on Laika’s
space flight, from November 3, 1957

Nanuka Tchitchou’s artwork

Related posts:

1. Yeasayer and Warpaint Besiege the Natural History Museum
2. Ryan Gosling
3. N. Ireland and the U.S.: A Shared Civil Rights Struggle

She was jailed for a day, but would not be deterred. “I didn’t care how many times they would catch me,” she says. “I wouldn’t ever go back to my house.”

Hernandez left Mexico City on a Wednesday. Five days later, she had crossed the border into the United States and found employment at the garment factory where her sister worked. Hernandez was 17 years old then, and for the last fifteen years, has labored in garment factories and sweatshops in Los Angeles. She says that some employers treated her well,
while others forced her to work in unsanitary conditions, locked her in, denied her water, and refused her access to the bathroom. Once again, enough became enough.

This is not a story with a happy ending; one that wraps up neatly with the bad guys being punished and the underdogs prevailing. We are catching up
with this story, in media res, as the 21st century dawns and the gears of globalization restructure how we manufacture and distribute goods. But at the human level of this transition is Lupe Hernandez and millions of women like her.

As Hernandez says, her story is “muy, muy típico.” According to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center, there are an estimated 12 million undocumented male and female workers in America, today. “Immigrants come to this country and we think that there are a lot of jobs,” Hernandez says. “Well, there are many jobs, but they’re jobs of exploitation.”

For many undocumented people in Los Angeles, garment work provides entry into this underground economy, offering those who don’t speak English, or with little work experience, a quick way to make some money. But for those who work in the sweatshops, their efforts are anything but lucrative. Around 67 percent of Los Angeles factories that produce clothing pay their employees less than minimum wage, according to a study, in 2000, by the U.S. Department of Labor. But this is no secret. It is tacitly understood that the people who make the products that Americans consume, including, and especially, the clothes we wear, are probably exploited and underpaid, but we look the other way. After all, the backbone of the American economy was forged by slavery and a model of capitalism that bases its structure on the fact that somewhere in the line of production, someone is not being paid, or is being paid very little.

It’s what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in 1933, called “the race to the bottom,” a global economy, where employers in an unregulated market continually lower their employees’ wages in order to stay competitive, which would cause their competitors to lower their workers’ wages in response, and so on. This plummeting of wages could then reach a theoretical zero point, where employees’ pay would potentially fall to zero.

Stories about sweatshops don’t often appear in the mainstream media. Why cover sweatshops as “news,” when they’re the norm? During the era of Progressivism, Jacob Riis’s photographic reportage of the tenements on New York’s Lower East Side, at the turn of the century, and Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, opened our eyes
to the plight of the lower class. In 1995, sweatshops re-entered the media’s viewfinder when authorities discovered an apartment complex of nearly seventy Thai garment workers, some who had been enslaved for up to 17 years, in the sleepy L.A. suburb of El Monte. The workers were housed in an apartment complex, with ten people packed into a room built for two. They worked eighteen-hour days, surrounded by barbed-wire fences and armed guards, as they sewed clothes for some of the biggest retail chains in the country. The media coverage of this human-rights violation reinvigorated the anti-sweatshop movement in Los Angeles and brought awareness to the embarrassing revelation that some retailers were manufacturing clothes without concern for the people who did the backbreaking work. And for those at the top of the retail chain, it seemed that blissful ignorance and denial was de rigueur.

When Spanish filmmaker Almudena Carracedo first came to the U.S., she couldn’t understand how one of the richest countries in the world could still
use sweatshop labor in the 21st century. She set out to make change by documenting the lives of three garment workers in Los Angeles. What was supposed to be a short project turned into last year’s PBS feature, Made in L.A., which focuses on workers in Los Angeles’ garment district, who are organizing against one of the biggest perpetrators of workers’ rights violations in the city: Forever 21, a retail chain popular among teens for its inexpensive, disposable fashions. “The goal of the film was to show what it was like for people at the bottom,” Carracedo says. “It provides a window into the lives of those who make our clothes, and to humanize their story—to make them not seem like just a number.” While shooting footage of a garment workers’ protest, Carracedo approached a woman in the crowd for a quick on camera interview: Lupe Hernandez.

“My mother was paid around a dollar for every dress she worked on,” says Lee, “which
would retail for about $99, so she made about one percent of the garment’s end cost. Keep in mind, this was the seventies, and that’s about the same that workers make today.”

In her documentary, Carracedo traces the evolution of garment workers Maria Pineda, a struggling mother; Maura Colorado, an El Salvadoran who, in eighteen years, hasn’t seen the sons she left behind; and the charismatic Hernandez, as they attend classes at the Garment Worker Center, at the edge of the Fashion District.

The Center is embedded in a small building near Santee Alley—a bustling street where vendors hawk Prada-like bags, Gucci-esque sunglasses, and other faux fashion—and
acts as both a respite from the harsh conditions of the factories and a place to organize
for workers’ rights. The director of the Center, Kimi Lee, whose mother is a Burmese ex-garment worker, understands the hardships and the stress that sweatshops foster.
“My mother was paid around a dollar for every dress she worked on,” says Lee, “which
would retail for about $99, so she made about one percent of the garment’s end cost. Keep in mind, this was the seventies, and that’s about the same that workers make today.”

After three years of organizing boycotts and protests against Forever 21—spreading the word on street corners and filing lawsuits for back wages—the clothing corporation settled the case organized by the Garment Worker Center. Victory, at last. But this isn’t the end of the story; it’s the beginning of a larger battle for the rights and dignity of all workers. Lupe Hernandez is now on the front lines of this fight, working as an organizer for Sweatshop Watch, and helping to educate workers on ways to break the paradigm of exploitative labor.

“The more that I learn, the lonelier I feel,” says Hernandez, in the film. “Ignorance protects you, but I realize I’ve come this far and no one can take that away from me.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from Flaunt Magazine, Issue 92 2008

*
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For Your Perusal:

Check out the printable PDF of this article

Related posts:

1. 1st Annual Urban Iditarod Los Angeles
2. Abusing The Threshold: Turning the Screws of Los Angeles’ Experimental Noise Scene
3. How Do Children Process, Learn About Race?

No related posts.

The girl, with the machine and its pedals, is producing piercing feedback. There are no lyrics and no apparent structure to the music. The deep, warm fuzz of grimy distortion builds louder with every spin of the machine and as the harshness of the screeching feedback swells, the tightly gathered audience watches intensely, covers their ears, or shakes like the congregation at a Pentecostal snake-handling revival.Eva Aguila, who is performing, as she often does, as Kevin Shields (as in the name of My Bloody Valentine’s guitar slayer) is the girl in the middle of the crowd. Aguila pushes the limits of music, challenges the conventions of what music is at all. “Noise music” (like Aguila’s moniker) is a misnomer, for what you hear at The Smell is neither noise nor music. It’s sonic experimentation aimed at the visceral affect—the feeling—of sound, rather than the confines of song structure. It is performance art fighting with technology and expectation. As the distorted screeches and sculpted feedback progress, Aguila’s set begins to feel less like a screwdriver to the ear; it becomes a little comforting, like being enveloped in the warmth and inertia of electric sound waves.

Since 1998, The Smell has hidden itself in the shadows of downtown L.A.’s skyscrapers, as the big-budget venues of Hollywood nightlife provide a distraction for tourists and taste-making poseurs, allowing it to remain an accessible, all-ages venue dedicated to free-form experimentation and the DIY ethic. As such, it is a magnet drawing in kids from the fringe—the faraway corners of Los Angeles County, the myriad towns of the Inland Empire, and the seemingly endless Valley.As with most unique subcultures, the attempt to pull apart, dissect, and categorize the harsh noise scene has seen it dubbed the “new punk,” a middle finger to a music industry that has co-opted, chewed up, and commodified outliers of rock, rap, and even “indie” music genres. But, in essence, noise is really a return to the confrontation that the free-jazz pioneers and the avant-garde once proposed.

Some noise artists speed up the tempo of existing songs until the drumbeats sound like a hum. They have built instruments from guitar parts and old wooden planks only to destroy them onstage. They bark into megaphones so distorted that vocals sound more like a Hendrix guitar line.The harsh-noise scene, of which Kevin Shields is a part, can be described by a more grating sound, while the party-noise scene injects diced-up beats into dense musical mélange. There really aren’t any common themes among artists, other than they are all vastly different, and their songs are mostly irreproducible. But despite its different musical styles, the noise scene is intensely incestuous, with artists consistently collaborating, playing under five or six monikers, or even playing at the same time. Aguila, for example, performs as Kevin Shields—alone, and with others—but is also known as Gang Wizard. The emphasis is on innovation in all forms, and in the overlap between sounds and ideas something new is created. Like the Happenings of the sixties, a noise performance can never be exactly repeated. In our age of infinite digital mimicry permeating nearly all aspects of life, unique, discreet events become all the more important.

When saxaphonist and free-jazz innovator Ornette Coleman recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come, in 1959, his sporadic bursts of dissonant tones, fast runs of unusual scales, and rejection of convention were as hard-core as the technophilic blasting that noise is now. T. S. Eliot’s fragmented epic poem, “The Waste Land,” a pastiche of the everyday sounds of London, cacophonous memory, and modernism thrust upon Europe by the destructive bombs of WWI and deconstructive explosions of artistic experimentation, made it a kind of prototypical noise music. “These are fragments shored against my ruin,” Eliot wrote. And today, noise artists are the Jackson Pollocks of sound; they splatter noise against an invisible canvas and advance technology beyond the point of conventional expression, delving into a world of sonic transmogrification.

Noise is nothing new in L.A. From the late-sixties musical experiments at the Beyond Baroque art space in the thriving psychedelic arts community of Venice to the late-seventies noise-punk explosion at The Masque (home to The Germs and The Cramps) between 1977 and 1979 in Hollywood, Los Angeles has a rich tradition of experimentation and innovation in music. The main difference today is the availability and the access to the noise-makers of the moment. When the L.A. noise scene was young, the primary mode of distribution was pressing records and creating handmade fanzines that would report on noise artists who were way outside the media mainstream. These fringe artists would never make it into Rolling Stone, so the zine was a crucial element of getting images and words out there, no matter how crude the cut-and-pasted Xeroxed pamphlets looked.

Zines were based on proximity and access to sympathetic friends at copy shops, whereas today the Internet plays an integral role in the proliferation of noise. Web sites like IHeartNoise.com, home to Phil Blankenship’s prolific label Troniks, keep the information flowing, with an ease and efficiency that could never be attained before. The listenership has now become global with MySpace, so the relevance of a kid with a Casio keyboard in Missoula is equal to that of any loft-dwelling Brooklyn hipster. East Coast noise bands like Sonic Youth, Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, and Wolf Eyes enjoy immense popularity, and Japanese noise rockers, for example The Boredoms and Boris, are well known for their extreme technicality, but the L.A. scene focuses more on novelty and innovation. Primarily solo acts with an electronica bent, these bands make “party noise” that is sometimes meant to be tongue-in-cheek, and always meant to be fun.

“Noise has always needed some sunshine injected into it,” says Brian Miller, one of Eva Aguila’s collaborators and head of noise label Deathbomb Arc. “This is where the Beach Boys came from. I like to think that L.A.’s contribution to noise is similar to how those guys interpreted rock ’n’ roll.” Some in the L.A. scene take seminal Japanese noise artist Merzbow’s famous adage to the next level, “If, by noise, you mean uncomfortable sound, then pop music is noise to me.”

Steven Cano, who goes by the name tik///tik, makes mangled versions of pop songs and believes his music takes more from the bizarre, eyeball-headed band Residents than strict noise purists. Entombed under layers of distortion squirms the ghost of a saccharine pop song, barely puttinga beat to what might be highly processed vocals, if they could even be called that. Feedback and the crunch of what might be a hundred stompboxes fill in the body of tik///tik’s compositions, but he doesn’t believe that he’s harsh.

“There are relevant and active artists who have been doing this for fifteen-year-plus, says Cano. I’m sure it might be a little sickening for them to see me come into a venue and slam down my multicolored digital gear and sing my Hilary Duff-loving heart out. I feel like I am making art and music, but definitely art and music with a lowercase ‘a’ and a lowercase ‘m.’ In my head, I am kind of making charred-up pop music.”

Unicorn Hard-On takes a similar approach, using highly deconstructed, quasi pop songs as an outline. But, unlike many of the selfproclaimed harsh heads who make irreproducible, rhythmless sonic textures, she utilizes repetition as her musical touchstone.

“Repetition of melody is a signature of mine, and the consistent beat,” she says. “The way I see it, the melodies are the characters and the beat is the background. They give the song a face and a feeling; then I can deconstruct it and tell a story.”

Valerie Martino, as Unicorn Hard-On, is known outside the noise world, follows old-school noise tradition when she releases an album, which comes accompanied by her artwork, a mix-tape, even a mini-zine. “There is a feel I’m going for, contemporary nostalgia, perhaps,” she says. “I’ve had many different kinds of packaging: spraypaint, stencil, screenprint, photocopy, domestic traditional women’s arts like sewing, felting, knitting.”

The art of noise, in many ways, depends upon a kind of visualnoise aesthetic, mashing together commercial iconography, bright (and sometimes annoyingly loud) colors, with a slight emphasis on the design culture of the video-game generation and after. The arts collective Paper Rad utilizes this anti-aesthetic to make videos for established noise bands Lightning Bolt and Wolf Eyes, which their distributor, Load Records, says “make Saturday morning cartoons look like the Nazi-programmed oatmeal of consumer misery.” Like much of the outsider or pixilated pop-surrealist art that is popularized in galleries like 8-Bit, in Los Angeles, Paper Rad uses very basic computer graphic design from the embryonic stage of the Internet. They layer images of Bart Simpson, the Hamburglar, and clip art into a mess of multimedia refuse that we all wish we didn’t recognize. The cover of Unicorn Hard-on’s collaboration with Taiwan Deth, on a seven-inch, pictures a childlike image of a unicorn against swirling purple background. Like Kevin Shield’s cacophonous, gargantuan sound, Unicorn Hard-On’s repetitive beats hollow out a space for introspection within tumultuous waves of sound. The cornerstone of music is a beat: the rhythm.

After all, don’t we become human to the beat of an organic drumbeat—our mothers’ hearts—for nine months before we enter the world? So the innate allure to the beat is no surprise. But much of noise music exists without a beat, focusing mostly on improvisation and the random variations and interactions created between competing machines and the feedback it creates. Out of these seemingly random acts of science, with the noise artist at the helm, there emerges a pattern.

Much as it does in John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” the swirling caterwaul of noise begins to take on meaning and structure on a larger scale when perspective can be taken and the relationship between the notes (or absence of notes) is gleaned. It’s like looking at fractals—the infinite repeating patterns within a leaf—or the cell on the hand of the man at the picnic portrayed in Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten film.

The resurgence of L.A.’s noise scene is not a spontaneous development. The creation of two spaces for noise, Il Corral, near Melrose and Heliotrope avenues, and the art gallery Pehrspace, in Echo Park, is due to the success of The Smell and the explosion of L.A. noise artists like Cherrypoint, Dog Shit Taco, and the masters of party-noise ravesploitation, Captain Ahab.

Il Corral hosts large gatherings of noiseheads for the “Turn the Screws” festivals and an insane event known as “40 Bands 80 Minutes.” Noise promoter Sean Carnage developed the idea for the stunt, about which he made a film, after curating successful, and more eclectic, shows on Monday nights at Il Corral. “I wanted to instigate a situation where I could mix all these people together and get the spirit of the shows I grew up with,” Carnage said.

Carnage, who is 35, grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where he says the music scene was an intimate community that celebrated the fringe, especially performance art and noise, because there was nothing else to do. In that small scene, he would organize shows based simply upon what he liked. He created the zine U.S. Rocker without worrying what was popular or whether it would create a cohesive environment. When he moved to L.A. four years ago, he was struck by the isolation of living in a sprawling city.

“I was struck at how isolated people were here and how ironic it was that it was a city with so many people,” he said. So he tried to foster a community like that in Cleveland, by putting on DIY shows every Monday.

The shows became packed with noise bands, harshheads, and experimental acts, and Carnage became an indispensable part of the local scene as it organized around him. Then, in 2006, he came up with the plan for “40 Bands 80 Minutes,” for which he would choose his favorite bands who played his Monday-night shows and condense them each into two-minute sets. With a bit of serendipity, Carnage was afforded another opportunity. “The idea was to take a Monday-night show and document it. I really wanted it to be the biggest show of all time. Then, I was recently locked out of a job at a gay network, QTN, which went out of business, so I had a professional TV crew to use, who all had an ax to grind.”

Seizing this opportunity, Carnage had the crew film the entirety of the show, and then completed post-production in seven hours with an editing model that he took from his day job: porn.

The frantically paced DVD chronicles the full eighty minutes, with rough production values that augment the feeling of being there among the dancers and the headbangers. The noise is crisp and clear, and the experience, watching emerging noise-rock talents Health and Anavan, for example, drips with the energy of the live performance, as audience members grab at Anavan’s drummer and singer Aaron Buckley’s hockey helmet. Minutes later, Health’s vocalist, Jacob Duzsik, stabs his microphone at a guitar amp, creating searing feedback and a delightfully noisy new layer. The DVD provides a glimpse into a slice of the community that Carnage helped create, essentially picking up where Penelope Spheeris’ documentary of burgeoning L.A. punkdom, The Decline of Western Civilization, left off, in 1981. But this time, the kids are louder, happier, and having much more fun.

“[L.A.’s noise scene] is very community-oriented and accessible,” says Carnage. “L.A. has so many professional musicians, and the people who are underneath the music industry are really free, open, and unpretentious.”
Carnage is now promoting his Monday-night shows at Pehrspace, an Echo Park gallery that allows him the freedom to develop shows as he wants, breaking down the genres that he says people of the iPod generation are not willing to obey. Venues like The Smell, Il Corral, and Pehrspace are sites of musical cannibalism, where everyone devours new ideas, images, or sounds of roughly the same species and spits them out. These spaces are unmitigated blank canvases, testing grounds for advancing the threshold of the mainstream—creating the shape of music to come.

“With nobody watching the gate,” Carnage says, “you have a tremendous audience that you can build. Like a lot of fringe genres, [noise] is reviled by the mainstream. It’s despised. Luckily, when you’re in a genre that is despised, you get a lot of freedom.”

By Drew Tewksbury

Photos by Drew Tewksbury

Illustration by Lifelong Friendship Society 

Published Flaunt Magazine June 2007

Click here for the Printable PDF of this article with amazing illustrations by Lifelong Friendship Society

Related posts:

1. Dungen – 4
2. Concert Review: The Horrors
3. No Age

Valerie Bertinelli to Write Memoir

By Drew Tewksbury

Originally posted Wednesday July 11, 2007 08:30 AM EDT

Valerie Bertinelli has held many titles: sitcom star, rock-star wife – and now, author.

Bertinelli, 47, who talked to PEOPLE in April about her weight battle, will write a memoir called “Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time.” The book will be published in April 2008.

Bertinelli’s memoir also will delve into her life as a teenage TV star and her 20-year marriage to rock legend Eddie Van Halen, which ended in divorce in 2005. But memoir will center on her challenges with weight loss and self-esteem issues.

“Writing a book is an exciting new adventure for me,” Bertinelli said in a statement from her publisher, the Free Press.

In April, she vowed to PEOPLE that she would lose 30 lbs. by September.

“I need to do this in front of millions of people so I can’t mess up,”
she said. According to her Jenny Craig blog – Bertinelli is the company’s current spokeswoman – she’s lost at least 23 lbs. so far.

With her Jenny Craig gig, Bertinelli took a step back into the media spotlight, but with her memoir, she says she’s not afraid of opening the door to her private life.

“I’ve grown up in and out of the public eye, survived some tough times, learned some important lessons, and come out – as has my entire family – in a great place,” she said in the statement.

Related posts:

1. Dirty Found Magazine
2. Punk ’77 by James Stark
3. Interviews: Julian Schnabel and cast of “Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

Related posts:

1. Black Math Horseman – Wyllt
2. The Drones – Havilah
3. Concert Preview

Inside a Watts housing project, a Pepsi-sponsored recording studio burns hip-hop to disc, and another corporate logo to the face of urban culture.
By Drew Tewksbury

It’s no secret that Los Angeles is a city torn in two. Like any city, Los Angeles is awash with half-truths and half-remembered lies, geographically and ideologically bisected into separate but equally imagined parts: the good parts of town and the bad parts of town.

Wherever you are, there’s an adjacent neighborhood you’re not supposed to go into — a place drenched in the realms of the unknown. For many living north of the 10 freeway, the mythology of these forbidden places becomes a comfortable binary to the lives of the beachside and the high-rise. But it’s easy to forget that these places are real — that these “bad parts” house real, live people living under the smog of media terms like drive-bys, gangs, and the projects. These spaces — these unknown cities — filled with interwoven fact and fiction, become an urban forest delineated by fear.

For many Angelenos, this unknown city is Watts.
It was only a few months ago that Imperial Courts was simply another housing project stoking the hive of gang activity in Watts. With the historic gang treaty of 1992 broken, the PJ Crips of Imperial Courts reanimate as they ally with the infamous Bountyhunter Bloods of Nickerson Gardens against the Grape Street Crips of Jordan Downs.

It’s a lot of names, and a lot of colors, and it’s some bad shit of Shakespearian magnitude.
But on September 16th a story cracked the headlines of local news, reeling Watts in from the media periphery. And this time it wasn’t about violence. In fact, it was just the opposite; it was the other side of the media coin — a human-interest story. After much anticipation and even more bureaucracy, a recording studio has opened inside the red, white and blue cinder block walls of the Imperial Court. The realized dream of Jonathan Hart — a 20-year-old, genuine and ambitious resident — the studio will provide free access to the residents and act as an agent of musical education, job training and emotional release.

“I was born and raised in Imperial Courts, I’ve been there all my life. You can use hip-hop to show how you feel instead of taking it out on somebody, and that’s how I make music; everything that I’ve been through, I throw it in a song,” Jonathan explains.
He’s definitely on the right track.

With the deteriorating funding for arts and music in schools, there are few options for those who want to pursue a career in music or those who simply want to throw styles with their friends. So after months of meetings with city Housing Authority and heaps of bureaucracy, Hart set out to find help with his groundbreaking endeavor.

Hart’s approved proposal was picked up by Benjamin F. Chavis, former President of the NAACP and current president/CEO of Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. Chavis’s HSAN partner happens to be media mogul/hip-hop titan Russell Simmons. As the founder of Def Jam records (a venture that began with Rick Rubin in a dorm room 21 years ago) and current CEO of Rush Communications, Simmons was the right person to go to for all things hip-hop. Together, Chavis and Simmons devised a plan to raise the funds needed for the studio.

And like all good plans, this one involved Ludacris.

It was two years ago that Atlanta rapper Ludacris lost his endorsement deal with Pepsi-Cola following a frenzy of criticism by wary consumers, afraid of more violent and sexually charged lyrics. Simmons and Chavis defended Ludacris and threatened to have the hip-hop community boycott Pepsi. After a heated standoff, Pepsi decided to donate $1 million towards HSAN’s charities for kids, in this case bringing Jonathan Hart’s studio to life.

It’s another rags to riches story, a real live American Dream, and it’s all brought to you by Pepsi.

Oh yeah, and Russell Simmons.
But is hip-hop really the panacea to inner city social ills? Why are Pepsi and Simmons so interested in creating Generation DMX?

Pepsi’s m.o. may be uncertain, but it is certainly not the first big corporation to team up with prominent hip-hop (or basketball) figures for a charitable donation to inner city areas.

In 2002, Sprite began a campaign to refurbish old basketball courts in inner city areas with the help of the NBA (with whom they hold exclusive branding rights). In addition to the creation of these courts, the Sprite logo would be displayed prominently on the backboards. A similar idea was executed by Nike, who built courts iemblazoned with huge Nike swooshes.. On the one hand, these gestures of social responsibility are laudable in their intentions. Yet, it seems that the underlying motives are more fiscally motivated. Bigger than a billboard and with literal heavy foot traffic, both Nike and Sprite’s courts were unavoidable spaces of captive advertising, focused directly at a niche market that has often been alienated by media exclusion and a lack of buying power.

Now, Sprite and fast food chains like McDonald’s have discovered “urban” markets. Ask Destiny’s Child about McDonald’s apple-walnut salad, and if they’re “lovin’ it” as much as their McSponsored world tour. But Destiny’s Child aren’t the only ones eating at McDonald’s. Increasingly, fast food is becoming the food of American poverty. According to L.A. Health Action’s latest policy brief, nearly 60 percent of South L.A. residents are living in or near the poverty line. The vast majority of these people are Black and Latino, many of whom are also victims of soaring obesity and diabetes rates. “It’s unfortunate that the less well off you are in this country, the worse kind of service and food and things you need to live are given to you,” explains rapper Xzibit at the HSAN conference. “It’s about economics more than anything. More than race, it’s about economics.”

The world of corporate charitable donations and “urban” markets have become inextricably intertwined as more corporations focus their advertising to one of the fastest growing consumer groups. Marsha Calloway Campbell, president of the marketing firm Elite Consulting Enterprises, writes in Smart Biz online, “The African-American population is a fast-growing, relatively untapped wealth of marketing opportunities. [They] want to work with companies that give back to the community and have a community presence. They will be loyal if the company is perceived as having a vested interest in this market and their well-being, and if the company is perceived as one that cares and can be trusted.”

Simmons is no stranger to the “urban” markets or Campbell’s slightly reductive reasoning; he was one of the first to define and successfully create hip-hop as a lifestyle as well as a genre of music. In 1986, Simmons brought Run-DMC to Madison Square Garden where they were performing on their sold-out “Raising Hell” tour. The boys from Queens were urged by Russell to write a song about their favorite shoes called “My Adidas,” which not only told where their shoes had been, but also the exact ways in which they were worn. It eventually resulted in a top-five R&B record and turned into a tremendous endorsement deal when Simmons showed Adidas executives the impact of the rappers’ songs. During the group’s performance, Run asked everyone to raise an Adidas in the air. The crowd obeyed and, with one stinky salute, a sea of shell-toes emerged. The executives saw the power of urban aesthetics and the emergence of a distinct hip-hop culture. They signed Run- DMC for a $1.5 million contract and gave them their own brand of shoes featuring their own logo.

Take one lok at this get-rich-quick model, popularized by hip-hop-hero films like 8 Mile and the upcoming Get Rich or Die Trying, and you can see why the projects would want a recording studio. The reality of hip-hop often gets lost in the aesthetic and diluted by the rapper’s symbolic role — they are much more than artists or musicians. Xzibit explains, “I think that we are role models, that we’re just people that the kids look up to more than politicians, more than their teachers, and sometimes even more than their parents. I think that hip-hop has an impact because it’s so visual and so tangible for the inner city.”
Rappers become powerful business people in the realm of entertainment. Some make it on sheer talent and unique style (Kool Keith or Ol’ Dirty Bastard), but many others make it after being groomed as businessmen, label execs or producers (Sean “P. Puff Diddy Daddy” Combs and Master P).

Why is it that a great majority of hip-hop artists get big through the help of high-powered label execs who develop their images, buy their Bentleys, and bring them up from the underground, while these integral players remain invisible to inner city audiences? These are the people with briefcases, ties, and water cooler small talk — not the most exciting image. It would be a strange day to see kids at Nickerson Gardens wearing wingtips and bragging about how their portfolios are diversified like a motherfucker.

But this leaves a gaping hole in the minds of inner city youth, who live unaware of the importance of business savvy in their own success. Recognizing this need for financial education in urban areas, Simmons and Chavis once again took up the challenge, bringing their HSAN entourage to the Wiltern on Sept. 17th — the day after they opened the studios at Imperial Courts — where they held a conference for inner city kids called “Get Your Money Right.” The idea was to showcase black business owners and other financially successful black people in a panel discussion so that young urban kids could visualize a way out of the hood other than just rap. Then again, some members of the panel were rappers. Panel member, rapper, and Pimp My Ride host Xzibit warned of the complexities of change in the inner cities. “You can put on your shoes and walk out of the hood if you want to, it’s about staying out of the hood and empowering yourself and feeling comfortable that you can be somewhere, because if you get beat in the head and told that you are only a certain thing all your life, you kinda accept your position. And being subservient is not what’s up in 2005.”

Many of the audience members hailed from Watts and were most certainly Jonathan Hart’s peers. You could hear them give shout outs to Nickerson Gardens or just simply scream like it was a high-school lunchroom. Some held their heads in their hands only to perk up to see what Xzibit or the D.O.C. had to say. But one of the more insightful comments was made by a financial planner who was stationed at the end of the long table. Although his open-collared Oxford shirt wasn’t as cool as the D.O.C.’s indoor sunglasses, he said,”Looking at the people at this table, I feel like in my life I chose Plan B. But I just now realized that Plan B ain’t that bad.”

There was no response to the man’s comment, other than a guy wearing a Jesus baseball hat standing up and yelling “J-J-J-Jesus” in a G-unit approximation.

It’s definitely not hip to be square in Watts.

So, what’s the answer for Watts? Certainly there are better places to donate money than one music studio in one project. What about the King/Drew Magnet School, which has one of the highest graduation rates in the state? What about the decrepit social services? Conceivably, Pepsi is more concerned with generating future rappers-turned -spokespeople than quenching the thirst of a poverty-free generation.

In the end, it doesn’t matter onto whose tab this studio goes or where the money should have gone. For Jonathan Hart, the should-have’s and the could-haves are meaningless, it’s only in action that the spark for change can be lit. “I’ve been in the projects 20 years. I’m 20 years old, and I’m a positive person. Anything that I can do that’s positive for my community, I’m just trying to get it all together. Whatever I gotta do to get there I’m gonna do it, even if I have to ask for help to get there, I’m gonna do it.”

Perhaps it isn’t about providing new services to this already troubled neighborhood. Maybe it’s about planting a seed of dreams, as unattainable as they may be. Allowing people to have a space aside, where the pressures of the Bloods and the Crips, the marketing and soft drinks, and the politicians and the police are left outside.

To simply have a room of one’s own.

©2005 by Los Angeles Alternative LLC

Related posts:

1. 1st Annual Urban Iditarod Los Angeles
2. Fussible from Nortec Collective
3. The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell Gets a Grip