Sylvia Ji, Red Quechquemitls, and La Tehuana.

Sylvia Ji, an artist from San Francisco, has an interesting exhibit at the Joshua Liner Gallery in New York. It's striking stuff, both disturbing and beautiful. Some of the pieces I'm not so thrilled with, but these two are especially powerful.

Red Quechquemitls

 La Tehuana

Unfortunately, I probably won't be going to NY in time to catch this show.

P.

A Conversation With Chubbers The Love Chimp.

Whenever we watch the girls on Wednesday night, Luciya always monopolizes her beloved Gwams. Gwampa Peter is okay if no one else is around, but otherwise it's all Gwams, all the time. "It's just for girls, Gwampa," L. explains, polite, but firm. "It's not for boys."

So that means it's me and Mirabel, aka Chubbers the Love Chimp, etc. She has recently shed a lot of her baby fat, so the old nicknames like Fatty the Fat-Faced Ferret and The Loving Lump of Love Lard are no longer appropriate.

She has also become much more engaged and verbal, 

so while O. and L. pIay Mommy and Baby or demonstrate their
high-falutin' "Kolaudies Dance," Mirabel and I sit and have
long, refined conversations in fluent babble.

She loves throwing in a few juicy raspberries and especially,

punctuating her remarks with a loud motorboat flapping of 

her lower lip modulated by the four fingers of her left hand.

The tee shirt says it all.

Currently her favorite word is "a-da." She likes to say it with 

great force and gusto, but she likes it even better 

when I say it back to her. It never fails to elicit a delighted grin.

P.

"The Squid, Eating Dough In A Polyethelene Bag..."

This article in Artforum by the ever-quirky Greil Marcus reminded me of my deep love for that crazed musical shaman, Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart.

The Captain was a wild experimentalist using his voice, with its unusually wide range, free-associative, often seeming random lyrics, and warped sense of humor to create some of the oddest, yet strangely accessible songs, ever recorded. His music blended rock, blues, and psychedelia with free jazz, avant-garde and contemporary experimental composition.

He was a notorious control freak, driving his band through endless rehearsals until they were insanely tight. He recorded a fair amount of albums in the late 60s and early 70s, never achieving commercial success, but building a loyal cult following. He went dark in the late 70s, but came back strong with two of his best albums Doc at the Radar Station in 1980 and Ice Cream for Crow in 1982.

Unfortunately, that was the end of his recording career. He spent the remaining years of his life as a semi-recluse in Humboldt County, California, painting. He died in December, 2010.

My favorite, Doc at the Radar Station (1980). The cover artwork is his.



One of his paintings, Cross-Poked Shadow of a Crow, No. 1.

His classic piece of eclectic weirdness, the late-sixties double album Trout Mask Replica, has one of my favorite lines of his thrown in at random at the front of an unrelated track: "The squid, eating dough in a polyethelene bag, is fast and bulbous. Get me?"

I did. And so did lots of others.

P.