ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

I was just reading about the closing of  EAR-X-TACY in Louisville. So, us music dorks have lost another great gathering place. We lost another holy shrine.

In honor of EAR-X-TACY, I am re-publishing here, a blog I originally wrote 4 years ago on Myspace (remember them?), then later posted on FoundTrack. At the time I wrote this, Benway Records had just closed and I was having a hard time coping with it. It might sound silly to anybody who doesn't have this aural affliction, but the closing of a record store can really feel like a death in the family. It hurts.

Here's the original post in it's entirety:

                                                       FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND

The first record I ever bought with my own hard earned allowance was DESTROYER by Kiss. I could make some shit up and try to tell you it was The Stooges FUNHOUSE or Patti Smith's HORSES but I was 11 for Chrissakes!  No, it was Kiss.

 First of all, there's that cover. Four alien, super-powered freaks apparently dancing on the scattered remains of some city (Detroit?) decimated by the havoc that Kiss hath most surely wrought. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby wish they had thought of this.  Then there are the songs. "Detroit Rock City", "Flaming Youth", and the raging hormone fantasy of "Do You Love Me?"  When you're eleven years old, and you've liked girls since you could draw breath, but you also collect comic books, so girls just think you're a dork…well, you need Kiss!

 I bought that record at a Licorice Pizza in Hawthorne, California. I think it's a Subway sandwich shop now. But then, holding that record, staring at that cover, riding home on my bike, album tucked under my arms, putting it on, blasting the speaker, well,  I've just never been the same since.

 That day I contracted my first addiction, records. An obsessive search for musical ecstasy and redemption began. How that search ruled my life, and led me to the Ramones, The Clash, Bessie Smith, Minor Threat, Nina Simone, Fats Domino, PJ Harvey and a cast of thousands is better suited for a book rather than a blog.

 The point of all this is, in case you haven't noticed, the record store, as a concept, as a dream, as a haven, as an endless sea of possibility, hell, as a fucking business, has died. All of it. Gone!

 Music just doesn't seem to matter to people anymore. They don't care much about art at all. They don't care how it sounds. They don't want liner notes. They don't care who engineered Led Zeppelin II or who did that god-awful mix of Raw Power. Just compress as much memory into some little chunk’o’plastic as you can and be on your way. Which won't be far because…why would you leave the house?

 My favorite record store ever was Soundsations, in Culver City. It still exists, in a lesser form,  in a different location, but in the late seventies, on Sepulveda, it was run by this really great guy who had very obvious…um, challenges in his life. The gossip was that he had done too much acid in the sixties and it attacked portions of his brain, rendering certain physical functions problematic. That's believable. Here's the thing though, that guy knew everything there was to know about rock music. He knew it all. Blind Willie McTell? He'd tell you what kind of shoes he wore. It was sometimes hard to understand him and when you didn't, he would get royally pissed. I have a vague memory of him throwing something at me once. I loved that guy. He refused to sell me Boston’s “Don’t Look Back”.  He protected me. It was because of him, I first heard John Cale's paranoia epic "FEAR". I bought "Trout Mask Replica" from that guy.

 I don't know where he, is now but I bet he's unhappy. He didn't belong anywhere, except a record store. It was the only place he was at home. In his room, surrounded by great art, that's where he was okay. He was just like me.

 You couldn't get me out of a record store.   I spent a good portion of my adult years working in vinyl dins of inequity.  I started at Tower Records (dead).  I worked at Music Plus (dead), The Wherehouse (gasping for air), Vinyl Fetish (the Cahuenga store isn't worthy to spit-shine the Doc Martin boot of the former Melrose location), I even worked for that pathetic Mall canker sore Sam Goody (mercifully reduced from 1300 stores to 191). If you couldn't find me selling records, you could find me shopping for records,  at Go-Boy (gone), or Moby Disc (being given life support by Django’s), or Aron’s (one of the best, buried alive by Napster).

 In recent years, with my horizons fading to black, you could find me at Amoeba (very dangerous place that)…or Benway Records.

 Benway was not the gargantuan monolith that Amoeba is, but Benway was everything a record store needs to be. You didn't go into Benway looking for one specific thing. On any given day, you could scour the bins and dig up some long forgotten jewel or some obscure critic fave you wanted to debunk, a Misfits t-shirt, and an Operation Ivy button. Whether it was Ron or Kelly at the front of the house, you had a fellow opinionated rock geek to commiserate with, rant with, inform and learn with. If I told Kelly that Ozzy's "Black Rain" album didn't entirely suck if you skipped the power ballad, she'd put it on and play it LOUD!!  I got all four of Camille Rose Garcia's dolls there. Sure, I could've gotten them at Wacko but I wouldn't have also come away with the Violent Femmes cover of the Tom Waits song "Step Right Up", like I did at Benway.

 When Aron’s had their going out of business sale, I took advantage of it like any vinyl junky would, but when Benway was closing, I couldn't do it. I couldn't pick over the bones of a friend like that. It was just too sad. It hurt too much. 

 So dear readers, the record store as dream factory has died. My safe-haven is gone. There are a lot of reasons why this has happened. It goes deeper than technology. More than anything else, I think we're just spoiled, fat, and lazy. Give me convenience or give me death! It's just too much trouble to pull the vinyl, clean the record, drop the needle, flip the record, and then there's all that listening you have to do. We have developed a ring tone attention span, and are hurtling ourselves into an artless coma. So, generation (why), as Sleater Kinney said, "you're no rock-n-roll fun."

 I defined myself in record stores and mosh pits. They were my church.

Amoeba will probably survive awhile what with all the neon and sheer girth but Benway's closing symbolizes for me the last clenched fist on the vinyl precipice opening up and letting go. I'm going to miss talking to Kelly in our natural habitat. I miss Benway already.

As I write this Joy Division is reaching the crescendo of “Day of the Lords" on my turntable.

                   

                   "This is the room, the start of it all

                     Through childhood, through youth, I remember it all,

                     Oh, I’ve seen the nights filled with blood sport and pain.

                     And the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained.

                     Where will it end? Where will it end?

                     Where will it end? Where will it end?"

 That means "Isolation" is next, so I should go get a “lighter head for my heavy heart”. Soon it'll be time to flip the record.

Keith Ross Dugas

11/01/2007

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: Jeremy Fish

Last night, I went to the opening of "Rise Of The Underground" at the Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City. The show features the work of Jeremy Fish (and Kenichi Yokono).

I can only tell you what I see. I can only attempt to describe how I feel about it. Jeremy Fish might very well contradict me. He might say I'm way off the mark, but his paintings feel like the point where tidy folklore and modern clutter meet. His paintings seem to sing Americana. Banjo and fiddle music pour out of the wood, and tell dark stories with a playful grin. Think less Blitzen Trapper and more Louvin Brothers (if performed by Beck). Woodland creatures are trapped in a frantic maze of  highways. Skyscrapers explode around bear skulls. Other critters are easily unzipped, only to reveal sad angels standing sentry to discarded bones.

Jeremy Fish typically traffics in shades of singular color, or complementaries, always accentuated by seductive black contour lines. He makes it look too easy. It can be deceiving. There's a lot of detail in these pieces. Gentle washes of pigment, painstakingly applied for shading, can escape your eye at a distance. Clusters of leaves seem so natural that you might not think what a pain in the ass they must have been to execute. Delicate lines of fur flow just so. Mr. Fish has a command of line weights that I can only assume came from a history of comic collecting.

As for Kenichi Yokono, his work is equally detailed and powerful, but they sing other songs. They seem to be of a different time and place than the Fish paintings. The works, side by side don't complement each other. Both of these artists would be better served by solo shows.

"RISE OF THE UNDERGROUND" runs through Dec. 17th, so you have plenty of time to head out to Culver City and check it out.
All photos by KrossD

TV EYE: Mixed Media Emotions

Heave a heavy sigh! This past week Bravo, the fine people who taught us what it means to be a "Real" housewife, launched season two of WORK OF ART: The Next Great Artist. Yes, I watched. No, I'm not proud of it. In fact, I feel dirty, and abused watching it, but watch I will.

For the uninitiated, WORK OF ART is a show in which art gets the Top Chef/Survivor game-show treatment. A group of artists (in the case of this season, all annoyingly young), are thrown into a studio together, given limited resources,  a specific task, and a time limit to produce "art". Then they are judged, by a panel of snooty-poots and week by agonizing week, an artist is cast off the island until there is only one left standing, and that person is dubbed "The Next Great Artist", and is awarded a show at the world renowned Brooklyn Museum Of Art (and some cash).

There are so many things wrong with this idea, that it's hard to know where to begin.

How does the sound of artists competing against each other for prizes feel to you? Are artists not historians? Are they not the mad visual poets documenting a culture for future generations? The thought of a dozen artists working against each other, in the same confined space, within the same charted parameters, just makes me shudder! I mean, they don't even do that in art school, do they?

Then there's the time limit. In most cases, they are given 24 hours to complete  a task. Have you ever met an artist? We can stare at a blank canvas for a week before a solid idea runs through our head. Personally, I'd have trouble doing a decent sketch in 24 hours. So yeah, let's get a bunch of young artists and apply intense pressure to their already fragile mindsets, and see what they do. Lab rats, each and every one.

The cast of characters should be familiar to anyone who has ever watched one of these types of shows. Even though these are "unique individuals", with eccentric, artsy personalities, they have clearly been chosen to fit a proven mold. There's the loathsome villain, there's the innocent, naive one from the mid-west, there's the freaky weirdo, there's the shy quiet one, there's the angry one, there's one struggling with their sexual identity, there's the funny one, and of course there's the black one (because we aren't racist here in TV land). You know them all. It's a pretty generic template.

So, why do I watch something so clearly designed to insult my intelligence, and sell me product? Why implicate myself in something that makes a mockery of high-art? For a few reasons I guess. One, high-art needs to be mocked. We need to all get over ourselves, and get back to the business of actually creating something worth having. Second, there is a surreal aspect to this particular show that you don't get in others of it's ilk. There is a jaw-dropping, "are you kidding me" moment in every episode. Yes, that is indeed Mary Ellen Mark, standing next to Jerry Saltz, and Sarah Jessica Parker debating the merits of a Gandolf made of Sculpey! MARY ELLEN MARK!!! How do you NOT watch something like that?!

Ultimately, I guess I just can't help myself. As a struggling artist, it's undeniably compelling. A hundred thousand dollars would buy most artists enough time to create something truly worthwhile, and the Brooklyn Museum Of Art would be a stellar place to unveil it. I'd kill for that! I just wouldn't do TV for that. I'm kind of rooting for them all. It's not fair what they are taking part in, but they are taking a shot. One of them will be given one hell of a gift, but will then have to try to shake off the stigma of being associated with the show. Therein lies the modern tragedy. I haven't mentioned any of the "contestants" by name here intentionally. I don't think their names should be known because of this silly show. They are going to have a hard enough time getting past that without my help.

I often say that I don't want to be famous, but if I truly analyze my motives, I guess that's not true. More than anything I just want my art to sustain me, but I would like to be mentioned in the art history books. I hope that in a hundred years, at least one of my paintings hangs on a wall somewhere, and that someone knows my name. I imagine that's what these kids want too. So, I root for them.