Party Pics

Amelia / Pheramones Split Cassette Repress

Repressssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

The Amelia / Phermones split cassette was 'repressed' a few months ago. This second edition has a beautiful blue hued cover. It was drawn by Maryn Jones and printed by Shout Out Loud Prints. I believe you can order this tape for three to four dollars from shop@shoutoutloudprints.com.

Amelia was a band I played bass in. We sounded like this.

Pheramones sounds like this.

Monster House 5/9/10

Stream of Pink Houses' and Slugging Percentage's sets. First is Pink Houses then click through for Slugging Percentage.

Or Download:
Pink Houses: mp3
Slugging Percentage: mp3

Lose The Tude 7 Inch Art

I just finished the design for our upcoming 7 inch on Sacred Plague Records. Should be out in a few months. The cover is science themed. BTW: I am open to designing records for bands. I like doing it.

Back cover and labels after "the jump."

Razorcake Article on Columbus DIY in Which my House is Mentioned

Razorcake just published this article by Bret who writes "Black Cloud." It just about sums it up, besides our relative wealth of zinesters and our roster of punk entrepreneurs. Also, with the 15th House being around for so long (2003? 2004?), Skylab existing equally as long, and with the Monster House being in its third year - the venues of the house show scene are more institutionalized then the year-by-year sentiment in the article (which was more true a couple of years ago: Hunter House, Screamer House, Stink House, House of Rice, Scoliosis House, Sheridan House, Villa Vietcong, 24/7 House, etc). Maybe now more people will spend a year being confused in a place they thought was cool (which I am all about).

Razorcake Article on CSBYS by Bret

Buddyhead Article on Columbus by Brian Carnahan

CSBYS Message Board

On a slightly related note, Aaron Lake Smith of Big Hands zine gets Plan-It-X records move to Cairo, Illinois ("punk town") in Time Magazine. Listen to an interview with Aaron about the story on Chicago Public Radio, here.

RAZORCAKE REVIEW OF AMELIA/PHERAMONES

AMELIA / PHERAMONES:
Split: Cassette
Amelia: This sounds like it could be pretty all right stuff; however, it’s recorded horribly, rendering it near unlistenable. The vocals are too loud while everything else is rather quiet and barely discernable. There are mainly female vocals with some male vocals. The hand-written note that came with it said that they are “’90s alternative.” I’ll buy that. Hope things work out better with the recording next time around. Pheramones: Well, it’s male-fronted poppy indie. Kinda playful, kinda heartfelt. I wouldn’t mind hearing it while sitting at a coffee shop, but it doesn’t really do too much for me. –Vincent Battilana (In The Pocket)

My Response: We have fans all across the 3rd floor with Amelia tattoos.

Amelia Record.
The Review.

Top 5 of 2000s: Bitter Homes & Gardens

"Perhaps human beings weren't made to be happy and free all the time, we're always trying to enslave ourselves one way or another, if it's not through a career it's through a relationship or it's through kids. It just doesn't seem to be the natural human state. We go through a good phase then we regress. I'm really glad you're happy just be prepared because tomorrow you might be thrown on the scrapheap." - Richard Linklater's Slacker.

Bitter Homes and Gardens' single album is dark gray. A dark gray manifesto in favor of admitting reality during the mid 2000s reign of unreal happy punks. It's music for those that refused to drink the Kool-Aid of folk-punk and bike rides and holding hands. The sound is bass heavy and shitty. The lyrics are saturated in self-loathing; personal excoriation permeates each and every song - a total rejection of the affirmative utopia that Bloomington signified on message boards across America. The first song on the album is actually called "Bloomington," an appropriate opener as the rest of the album can be thought of as the answer to one of its first lines:

"Do you think a person could just disappear on the walk from Seventh Street down to Town Square?"

Amelia - Complete Discography

                                                  Photo by Dana Curran

Amelia was a band I played bass in from the time I came back from Paris in the beginning of April until the middle of September when we broke up. We released a tape split with Pheramones, went on a short tour with Delay and played Berea Fest in Berea, D.I.T Fest in Kent, and (sort of) Southwest Folk Fest in Chicago. We had plans to release a seven-inch of some sort with rerecorded versions of some of the following songs. It should be noted: we had one more whole song, never recorded, and two more songs in the works, also not recorded. Ryan is now playing in Slugging Percentage and something with Austin Eilbeck, I occasionally sing for Lose The Tude and Maryn still plays solo.

Maryn's original recording of "Shapes."

1. Shapes

Ryan and Maryn's original demo:

1. Little Flower
2. We'll Land

Amelia's practice demo (recorded on my digital voice recorder):

1.  Little Flower
2.  I Just Can't
3.  "The Fast One"
4.  Bridges
5.  Heart of Mine
6.  We'll Land

Kari's recording (our side of the tape split with Pheramones).

1. Little Flower
2. I Just Can't
3. Heart of Mine
4. We'll Land
5. Bridges
6. Shapes

After "the jump" a list of all the shows we played:

A.A. Bondy Story

I was assigned a story about A.A. Bondy. This entailed talking to a real live music publicist who told me my admittedly long email address "wasn't making it easy for anyone." I'm lucky in the sense that Bondy isn't Red Wanting Blue or any of the more typical OSU bar bands the Lantern seems to cover. On the other hand, why I am writing public relations material for someone I really couldn't care less about? The whole practice of writing stories based on press releases and publicity contacts seems like a rather evil collusion for news organizations, even for the quasi legitimate stories of an "Arts Reporter." Bondy used to be in a pretty trite grunge "alt" band in the 90's called Verbena - here is the video for their big play into the mainstream.

I normally love (<3) nineties alternative music. But Verbena strikes me as hack work. Much the same can be said for Bondy's newer direction, that Dylan pose punk rockers often strike as they turn 30. There are some songs on his new album that I felt were good-ish... but it seems, like Pitchfork basically says, a soulless recapitulation of a genre's motifs. When that genre is punk, okay maybe, when it is "roots, blues, country influenced, Americana, singer-songwriter folk," no. Definitely not. I haven't retired to the land of NPR and concerts for the DNC quite yet.

I do manage to mention Merge Records and Thomas Function as well as make an allusion to This Bike is a Pipe Bomb.

After "the jump" is the story I turned in.
And the Lantern version.

Dale Chihuly - "Chihuly Illuminated."

Below is a very sedate and non-controversial review of the Dale Chihuly show at the CMA. I wrote it for the Lantern. Here are some insights I left out of it:

1. Sponsoring "Chihuly in Columbus" is a who's who of Columbus' large corporations - Huntington Bank, Nationwide Insurance, American Electric Power, The Columbus Dispatch, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, and others. Over five major exhibitions of his work have been held in Columbus since 1988. The Conservatory even bought a large part of his 2003 show to be a part of its permanent collection. The Conservatory, CMA and Hawk Galleries are all showing his studio's work right now. So much love because...

2. It is about nothing. Not in the Seinfeld way. It is empty aesthetics. It is ripe for corporate and institutional support because it says nothing. It is artwork for grandparents. His work is set outside of any contemporary art world considerations. It is nice looking, ornate glass. Sometimes it is neon. Sometimes his painting/sketches refer to Jackson Pollock, sometimes they refer to painting flowers. In the show his work is directly compared to Native American objects and designs. This is the rich, white, liberal, multi-cultural " I appreciate their artwork/culture/food" contempt/pillaging/appropriation/commodification/misuse of constructed authenticity, portion of the show. These white-bred conservative corporations (Dispatch: McCain in 08!) sponsoring the "remember before the genocide - their stuff looked nice" bullshit. The equation of nature in the tree with Native American life is unneeded + regressive + cynical.

Pandering to the idea of nature as inspiring. Quasi religious.

3. He has artist image branding a la Warhol + Beuys. Wacky hats and pants. Huge frizzy fro. It's just like an artist to be so unique in their personal style isn't it? That is something normals want/expect. Adds to stupid conceptions of creativity/"creatives."

4. One of the rooms shows work already shown  one mile away at the Conservatory. What?

5. Exhibition ends with a sign telling you to walk back through the exhibit to go to the lobby???

6. Dan Flavin's piece at end of show: hilarious.

7. By the way, let me emphasize that his signature on his painting/sketches takes up 1/6 to 1/4 of the picture plane and is centrally located in the bottom third of each panel. Not the lower right. It is as much of a design element as anything in any of the works - probably thee design element.

The Lantern Version.

My pre-editor review for the Lantern after "the jump."

Notes on Selling Out Part One

I don’t believe that people should make the good the enemy of the perfect. At the same time, that is the kind of bullshit that keeps Joe Lieberman in the Democratic caucus. So it needs to be evaluated.

MONSTER HOUSE 10/26/09

Delay
Batrider
The Pharmacy
Rage Against The Cage

Skylab Show October 26th

I'm booking this show at Skylab (57 E. Gay St.) for October 26th at 9pm. Batrider is a grunge band from New Zealand. Delay is a grunge band from Columbus. The Pharmacy is a grunge band from Seattle. Rage Against The Cage is a grunge band from the barbershop. This is during Aaron Hibbs' historic hula hoop run.

SWORD HEAVEN, DRUMS LIKE MACHINE GUNS 10/15

I recorded two sets.

Sword Heaven

Drums Like Machine Guns

CATSz & Thing

PARTY PICS

"THERE IS NO FUCKING DRINKING AT THE LEGION!!!!"

We made a "Before you play...." note for the Monster House in the style of the early 2000's Legion note. A bit less hilarious than that one.


"BEFORE PLAYING THE MONSTER HOUSE, READ THIS….

ABOUT US: The Monster House hosts shows in our home to give national, international, and local independent acts an autonomous, politically aware place to play in Columbus, OH. We strive to be a welcoming environment for anyone who wishes to come. Help us keep our house completely free of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and mindless disrespect. We believe shows in alternative spaces can lead to a more direct, personal and positive connection with music and with the other folks in attendance. Our house is not a launch pad to fame and fortune - it is part of a growing community intentionally challenging the popular definition of success. We know that the art and music we make can be shared on our own terms. Music is the reason for the gathering – it is not a house party, it is a show.

THE DOUGH: Donations of $5 are strongly encouraged at each show to support touring bands. Please make this apparent when advertising the show. The money is to support them, not the house. Locals play as support to the touring bands and will not normally be paid. Usually, locals get some food, have fun, play to an audience of music enthusiasts, and make a connection with an out of town band.

ARRIVE: Come by 8:00 pm for food, load-in, and line up arrangements. Normally, out of town bands will be welcomed to spend the night at our house.

BE A GOOD GUEST: Be courteous and clean up after yourself. While we allow drinking at our house please do not take this as an invitation to get inebriated to the point of 1. insulting others or 2. not being able to control yourself, mentally or physically.

THANKS ♥ MONSTERS"

R.I.P THIS IS A......

ASHES TO ASHES:

J. Caleb Mozzocco's essay "IN CONTEXT"

This essay is part of this ZINE available at the Mahan Gallery & Wexner Center Store.



















"In Context" by J.Caleb Mozzocco of everydayislikewednesday

Comic books have no place in an art gallery. That’s not a reflection of their worth compared to more gallery-ready media like painting or sculpture, but a simple statement of fact—there’s no place to put a comic book in an art gallery.

Oh, you can tear out a page, frame it and hang it on a well lit wall next to a little placard detailing who made it and when and out of what, but then it’s not a comic book anymore, it’s a piece of found visual art. That page you tore out is, after all, just a small part of a comic book, divorced from its context, removed from the way it’s meant to be experienced, and forced to become something one contemplates in a vacuum. Hanging it on a gallery wall is an alchemical process, and whether you’re turning the low
medium of comics’ lead into high art gold, or vice versa, you’re transforming it from a comic book to a piece of a comic book.

I suppose it’s a little like the difference between a stuffed deer head trophy hanging on the wall of a hunter’s den, and a real, live, whole deer. Technically the former is part of the latter, but there’s an awfully big gap between the two all the same.

As a medium, comics are pretty much gallery-proof. The ideal way to “display” a comic book in a gallery would probably be to set one on an end table next to a comfortable chair for a patron to read at their leisure. But even then, they’d be reading it in a gallery, which is a pretty different experience from reading it in the comfort of their own home. Or park or coffee shop or train or library or bookstore or wherever they read comics, or would read a comic if they did read comics.

The gulf between seeing a deer in a zoo and seeing it in the wild isn’t as wide as that between the trophy and the live deer, but it’s still a gulf.

We’re getting into territory that art people talk about at parties, near the beginning of the evening when it’s all polite shop and small talk, before the wine starts to take effect. You know, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, quantum physics and the idea that the act of observation alters reality, tree-falling-in-the-woods territory.

It’s a concern for all media I guess. Are paintings painted to hang on the walls of people’s homes, or in museums, or galleries, or the cover of The New Yorker or a greeting card? Can individual paintings move between those contexts without altering their meanings or effects on the viewer?

But I think the fine art world’s ever-increasing interest in comic books, now a serious, non-ironic interest as opposed to that shown by Andy Warhol/Roy Lichtenstein/Pop Art, only
underscores the peculiarity of the comics medium, the thing that separates it from other fine arts and other pop or commercial arts.

It’s a little of this, little of that - a composite sort of medium, something of a duck-billed platypus compared to the more thoroughbred media one usually associates with the art gallery.

The medium of Comics-with-a-capital-C, by whatever you want to call it, consists of works that are each whole, atomic units. A comic book isn’t a page or two, it’s all the pages, and if it’s a series, maybe it’s all the issues in that series. And it’s not even just what’s on those pages, but what happens in the reader’s mind while turning those pages, and between the panels as their eyes cross the borders of white space between them.

Looking at a page of comics art in a gallery then can be a little like looking at a still from a movie. It may look nice, but it wasn’t created to be looked at like that.

But then, galleries don’t even always just show the pages, but the art went into the creation of those final pages, making what can be hung on the wall a component of a component.

This isn’t intended to be an argument against curators and gallery owners in the fine arts world who wish to keep trying to display comics and comics art. I certainly don’t mean people shouldn’t put comics up on a metaphorical pedestal, even if they don’t fit on a literal pedestal as easily as a sculpture might.

Rather, this is just a reminder that there’s only one way to really experience a comic book as a comic book. When you go to a gallery to see an exhibit of comics art, you’re seeing some of the art that goes into a comic, you’re seeing a drawing that will eventually be an element in a comic, but you’re not experiencing comics.

These are pieces, blue prints and rough drafts for the actual finished product, each being displayed as found objects and/or recontextualized as fine art drawings. And that’s often something to see, as the pieces blue prints and rough drafts can be works of beauty.

Much is made of the words by which we talk about this medium, perhaps in large part due to its relative youth, the fact that it was quite accidentally created in the mid 1930s by a couple of shady businessmen
who were trying to figure out how to make a buck off the popularity of newspaper comic strips, and that it wasn’t until after the last third of the 20th century that anyone really started talking and writing about it as a distinct art form.

The biggest difficulty in talking about comics is by what name should we call the things we’re talking about—Comics? Comix? Graphic novels? Graphic books? Picture novels? Sequential art?

None seem quite right, despite the fact that the book-publishing industry, which has in the last decade glommed onto long-comics-with-spines as a hot new genre, seems to have settled on “graphic novels.”

The problems with the term “comic books” center on that first word, “comic,” a word which implies something that is humorous and/or ends happily. As inappropriate as that may seem when applied to many works, the “book” half of the term works surprisingly well in a lot of contexts. Because comics, like books, are something you have to read to really appreciate.

CURE-TOR NO-TE

For this recently put together publication:



















Which the gallery is selling for $5.00. I plan to release all of its written content in the following weeks on this blog. First, the curator's note I wrote:

"THIS IS A COMIC BOOK CURATOR'S NOTE

Rene Magritte’s “This Is Not a Pipe” tells us we are wrong about something we know we are inherently right about. This is a Comic Book does the opposite. It tells us we are right about something we inherently know is not true.

Representations (like a page unstuck from a comic book) activate all conceptions one has about the “real” object (and its platonic form). But amputation, decontextualization, and museumification serve to separate us from objects even as they allow us to physically be close to them. In the case of comics, the platonic form is the comic book: 32 pages, glossy cover, stapled, newsprint, and if possible, with slight yellowing. But that’s not what we get at exhibitions about comics. That would be too simple. In this paradox is a metaphor for the shedding of meaning that occurs to objects that have been ripped out of their historical, cultural, and physical roles and inserted into any one of the hundred of thousands of white-walled rooms across the world (some of which are inside buildings that used to serve an idiosyncratic, functional purpose in their society. Now: gallery).

Viewed as if it was not the product of an unreliable narrator, This is a Comic Book amply presents examples of several divergent paths comics have followed since the boom in independent, individual viewpoints (as opposed to collaborative creations from large companies) occurred in the late 60s(and mid 80s (and late 90s))). This includes work in abstraction, “art-school” comics, autobiography, genre re-imagining, mini-comics published independently, and web comics – as well as work that negates any discernable classification by entirely challenging what we think makes up a comic book.

But that is not “A Comic Book.” Or even representative of the majority of the comics industry; it’s barely representative of the “Indie” and “Arty” comics that typically interest the New Yorker/Book Forum stereotype. It is instead a selection that touches the lines, jumps the gutters, and succeeds in contradicting itself over and over again. We see things as new which are deeply ingrained in tradition (Dorothy Gambrell, Phonzie Davis) and things as old which break new ground at each successive turn (Chris Day, Conor Stechschulte). We see the mastery of “technique” in Nate Powell’s work but also the mastery of “technique” in Anders Nilsen’s. We are challenged by initially inscrutable narratives but also enveloped inside worlds that seem so much like our own. In other words, the selection is scattershot: just like the meaning and practice of comics.

Like independent music in the mid to late 80s, comics are in the midst of a creative revolution. And when the major labels came calling for that music, typified by bands like The Butthole Surfers, The Replacements, and Sonic Youth, they morphed it into a stultifying something else altogether, “Indie.” That co-optation by the major tastemakers denuded what was interesting about independent rock – namely its independence. Like punk rock, which loses all meaning when it is shrink-wrapped and footnoted, the immediacy of these comic visions is obscured against the white walls of the gallery. But this work, like the independent bands on SST and Subpop in the 80s, is undeniable. It calls out for public scrutiny and art world acknowledgment, not despite its “low” art pedigree but because of it. That relationship, the tenuous line between acceptance and co-optation, is at the heart of this exhibit and its accompanying catalog. We hope you enjoy it.

Jimi Payne & Colleen Grennan"