The Love and Respect World Wide Web Presence

Car, MP3: Opens with Whiting Tennis's humming-bird bassline, followed by my true story lyrics, and then the most beautiful and pulsing exchange of syncopated notes between Steve Turner and Whiting. Goof Mantra.

Chlamydia, MP3: Lyrical brilliance, I was in the zone that day.

Library Girl, MP3: For the Mudhoney completest, Steve Turner sings this true tale. The best part is three quarters of the way through when Steve can't keep a straight face and I smile every time.

Love You, MP3: Steve and Ed Fotheringham's guitars bounce and skip together as Ed applies his sexy and warm-crack-of-ice vocals in order to woo his true love.

Stupid Pretty Girl, MP3: Ed's wailing on this track is better then any of his work with the Thrown-ups on the Amphetamine Reptile label. His lyrics are sardonically wise.

Wanda Fuca, MP3: Backlash magazine didn't like this one.


ORIGINAL POST:



Couldn't Get High, MP3
Fug(g)'s cover, Whiting sings.

Fishy Respect, MP3
Double entendre and fish.

Hey, MP3
The lyrics: "Hey!"



I Hate Recess (When They Play Smear the Queer), MP3

If I Only Had a Brain, MP3

Roseanne, MP3
Mekon's cover

Summer Vacation, MP3







Steve LaRose, free MP3
This is actually a Sad and Lonely(s) song

Curvilinear Notes:
Couldn't Get High
For whatever reasons, "Couldn't Get High" was the first song that made the list. I googled "Couldn't Get High" and first hit upon a version of the lyrics at a location titled Slightly Soopid Lyrics. The next stop was dedicated to a record: "The Figgs Couldn't Get High". I've never heard of them, The Figgs, of course I had never heard of the Fuggs either, but that's beside the point. Here is the Figgs Looking Glass. I tangent. It seems that the "Fug(g)s" are most remembered with one "g". The Goblin Magazine Archives says of the Fugs first ablum:

This album came out of two jam sessions in Ed Sanders' Peace Eye bookstore. It's a raw and energetic folk rock record, but unfortunately the FUGS technical knowledge was limited. As Ed Sanders said, "We had absolutely no sense or belief that there would be any interest in this stuff 30 years later. It didn't occur to us at all, otherwise we might have paid more careful attention to the recording techniques - the placement of microphones, the quality of the tape recorder and so forth - especially with the live material. On one level, we just did all this for a joke. We decided to have some fun, party, and write some songs. We were poets, and we certainly knew how to write words, but none of us went to Juilliard, and when we made the first record we didn't even know how to face the microphones."

The lyrics on this album are first rate poetry (except when they're joking around) but the music is obviously stoned beatniks diddling out catchy folk-rock tunes. However, it is quaint and entertaining -- like a musical home movie.

I Couldn't Get High is the FUGS number one drug anthem: "I went to a party the other night/ I wanted to fill my brain with light/ I grabbed myself a bottle/ I thought in a while I'd be feeling fine but I couldn't get high/ I whipped out my pipe and filled it full of grass/ Gave myself a light/ I huffed, puffed, smoked and toked/ After a while my heart was nearly broke ..."

The point is, if you google couldn't get high fugs, your looking-glass feeds-back.
Whiting Tennis sings our version. Having never heard the original song, I fell in love with White's take on it and I couldn't hear it any other way.

Fishy Respect

Fishy Respect was a song that naturally oozed out of Mung Fest. That's me, on the right (seventeen years ago), struggling, dreaming, praying to connect with the band. Moving left we see Ed Fotheringham hunched over his white plastic retro-electro guitar. The mud-caked naked bass player is Whiting Tennis. Savy-to-it-all drummer Joe Culver twirled the sticks. Steve Turner may have been on tour with Mudhoney, but I imagine he wasn't too keen on the hippy nature of Mung Fest (A pre-rave, inner-city hippy/punk, low-impact camp out). Boy, those were the days.
Hey
Hey was the first track on our single put out on Volker Stewert's label Penultimate Records. Here is Volker at the Comet Tavern, 17 years ago. The man with a vision.As a classic six-degrees of separation example, Volker went to high school with my wife Stacy and Blake of eMpTy Records US in Germany. I didn't know that then, of course. Volker was this kook who was willing to pay for us to visit Jack Endino. I didn't understand it. I guess he just loved beer and punk-rock. Today he owns The Brewer's Art in Baltimore.
I Hate Recess (When They Played Smear the Queer)
The title pretty much says it all. There is a reference to Major Matt Mason in the song. If you were born in 1963, you might get it. I really did hate smear the queer. However, it probably forced me to come to terms with my athletic limitations and accelerated my drawing. That's not true. I really didn't get the Art thing until much later. Here is my first mural in the basement of a house I was sharing with five other guys. One of them was Joe.Joe played drums with Big Tube Squeezer, Love and Respect, The Sad and Lonely(s), and Bardo Pond. We sure messed up that house.
If I Only Had a Brain
This little ditty still makes me smile. The object was to never say the same thing twice. Whenever we preformed the song I tried to make things up spontaneous prose style. I'm very bad at spontaneous prose but very good at drinking beer. Ah. . . warts and all.
Rosanne
Rosanne is a Mekon's cover. It is one of my favorites. From Joe's stumbling drum to Whiting's flap-farting baseline, to Steve and Ed's dueling note dropping.
Summer Vacation
This song came from Steve Turner. I think it was a Mudhoney reject. He even handed me a piece of paper with the words for the chorus. Steve is often advertised as being in the band. He was certainly there for the recordings. But, I don't remember him ever at "practice" or when we played shows. Here are two pictures of shows, and Steve is not there!Steve wasn't there when Ed, Joe and Whiting took me to the "E" level of the University of Washington's parking garage. The "E" level had outlets you see. You could plug your gear in and make noise. That was my first taste of being in a band. Three talented compatriots taking me along for a ride. We played at the Vogue mostly.

Later, I went to grad school. One night, I drank too much Ouzo while reading Foucault's Madness and Civilization. I had written quite a bit of "visionary" text on my studio wall. I transcribed all that I could and sent the letter to either Joe, Ed, or Steve. They might have all been living together. Here is a great shot of Dan Peters and Steve.

Anyway, The Sad and Lonely(s) recorded a song called Steve LaRose. The record was produced by Dan. The song is sung by Joe, reading my Ouzo/Foucault words. Steve and Ed playing instruments.
"I find idleness is the ultimate rebellion!"

Indeed.

Picton Points

Introduction 101:
Take
and assume (for the sake of the discussion), that the point has some miniscule mass or volume.
Now move the point through space, or through time, or shine a light on it to create a shadow.
The shadow is
The movement traced is a line. Now move the line, or cast it's shadow.The next dimensional step isMove the plane
Then we haveWhat do we look like moving through space/time? From moment to moment, I've always felt rather solid. Is my future-shadow solid as well? I imagine my existence to be like a play-doh play-station extrusion. The present being the opening that the raw material is forced through. I wanted to call the opening shape a template, but discovered that ironically in the Plastic Profile Extrusion Business the opening is actually called a die. Our die shape is continually changing so our past isn't just one big profile.This Tom Friedman piece, made of straws, fits perfectly here and is a foreshadow of Matthew Picton's democratic? pedestrian? hardware storian? use of materials.

Introduction 102
Richard Tuttle has made some delicate and ephemeral pieces of art. In his own words, he attempts "to account for the invisible." One of my favorite series is his "wire pieces." They were delicate lines drawn on the wall with pieces of wire protruding from one end and a third shadow line created by carefull illumination. I couldn't find any photographs that did justice to these pieces. So I made this drawing.
I know that a coat hanger lacks subtlety, but I'm trying to make connections and give meaning, not create a sense of awe. Which is exactly what happens when you see a wire piece by Richard Tuttle. Even now, staring at my readymade Tuttle above, I realize that the profound space is not the sculptural wire, nor the drawing of shadows on the wall, rather it is the implied veil inbetween the two. The thing that isn't there. (As an aside, you might notice that I haven't updated my studio lighting yet. I'm still working with four bare bulbs that are equal distances from a central point on the wall).

Enter

Matthew Picton's new studio is two hundred yards from our house. Actually, in a town the size of Ashland, everything is two hundred yards from our house. That is not to say that Matthew is the typical small town artist. Last year he had three solo shows on the west coast: Mark Woolley Gallery in Portland, Toomey Tourell Gallery in San Francisco, and Solway Jones in Los Angeles. When I visited him he was getting ready for a show at Seattle's Howard House in April. In the picture above Matthew is removing the wooden stanchions used to support one of his newest wall pieces while the adhesive dried. Each joint of aluminum tubing is glued with a fairly flexible epoxy. The big test was to see if the whole thing could be wall mounted. This piece in paticular is based on a topographical map of the ocean floor.

It is a projectiton of topographical contour lines. Lines that were invented by Charles Hutton in order to help him gather data for Rev Nevil David Maskelyne in an effort to determine the mass of the earth.We have to use our imagination for the moment. Remove the city of wooden towers and orient a sun in space. Can you see the shadow that the wire-drawing will cast? If you can't, you better make it to the Howard House and see the real deal. . . assuming the epoxy holds up.

Matthew has often described his pieces as drawings in some way. I should take a moment to interject that in the "fine art world" contour lines can also be non-emotional descriptive lines that define space. For example, here is a line contour drawing of me:
For those of you who haven't seen me in awhile, I really do look like this. I wear Costco reading glasses, over-the-ear headphone orbs, and a short cropped beard to mask the gobbler jowls. Descriptive lines. Below is one of Matthew's pieces called Paris. Can you guess what the lines describe?

I wish you could see the little beads that make-up the Paris drawing. There is nothing between the lines, the beads are pain-stakingly affixed together. It brings up a certain element of Matthew's work that sometimes makes me think of Tom Friedman. Obsessiveness. Below is a mono-filimant line that is incredibly knotted by Friedman and is hung floor to ceiling.

Rather bead-like no? Neither artist finds "art" in the obsessive process exactly, its just that, as a viewer, we can't help but be in awe of the discipline sometimes. Actually, the visual similarity is only occasional. In fact, Friedman's pieces are super-charged with "holy-shit" wonder that radiates from otherwise mundane materials, while Matthew is using unique materials in order to point us towards the wonder that isn't there. Here is a detail of a drawing made from light diffusers cut and layered following the contours of a Scottish Moor. I'm not sure which one. If you scroll back up and look at the pic with Matthew working in it, you can see this twelve foot plus piece on the back wall.
And an ocean bed
Matthew is really thinking about drawing now. Compared to the cast pieces he has made in the past, which are much more akin to photography. Those would capture the moment. Frozen space and time like this side-walk resin casting. These are hung on the wall with a reflective surface behind them so the light filters through and bounces back out. . . they are really beautiful. The titles always tell us where the casts were made from. I think of them as hyper-real. They are near exact representations of a quality cast in resin. When I first met Matthew I couldn't help but make connections to Nina Levy's older castings in resin. Nina sculpts in a very traditional way and I don't think she ever casts anything from life. Infact, her tweaking of scale wouldn't allow her to. I guess I couldn't get beyond the hyper-realism/frozen resin moments. But I'm past all that now, and so are they. Matthew might actually, if he were still casting things, have connections with Rachel Whitread's public castings in resin. Below is a small version on an inverted plinth by her.
When I look at her work, and I've never seen it in real time, I always get the sensation that she is pointing us towards something that might be there, or could be there. The actual thing is gone and we are left with these ghosts. Diaphanous possibilities or memories. Like this resin water tower

Matthew's fissure from Crater Lake isn't connected to any human memory. It is a recording of Nature's intelligence.

I'm anxious to see how his pieces come together for his next show.
The next sculptural drawings.
Picton Points.