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When I was six, the city started building a big new Khrushchevka across the courtyard from our Khrushchevka. That’s what Russians call the featureless concrete apartment blocks that cover the nation like dystopian cubist boils. They’re named after the famed Nikita Khrushchev that pounded a desk with his shoe at the UN General Assembly. A huge hole was dug out for the foundation of the new rectangular prism, and soon i-beams, bricks, cable, and cement blocks began to materialize. Day to day the neighborhood kids would have wheelie contests along the courtyard road, and climb atop metal shed garages to see the construction. After the foul-mouthed red-nosed chain-smoking workers would leave, we’d climb into the hole and look around, carrying huge stones and pipes from here to there, pretending we were the construction crew, cussing and coughing off pretend cigarettes. It was our new amusement park.
Construction progress was sporadic. Day in and day out nothing would be built. Sometimes the bleary-eyed workers would return and add to the foundation. Then, construction simply stopped, and the new industrial amusement park became open 24-7 for the kids.
Around October there were heavy rains, and to our extreme joy, the derelict site flooded completely, turning the now familiar hole into a brand new attraction, a lake! To boot, the construction crew had left us everything we needed - empty barrels, wood, wire, tarps and tools - to make our own buccaneer fleet. The boys set to building rafts. It took a few unsuccessful christenings and drenched shivering deckhands running home to their babushkas to master the art, but in no time there were a dozen ships of fortune sailing the high Khrushchevian Seas, flying tattered flags drawn with markers, engaging in piracy, boardings, mutinies, and plunder. We even took prisoners, tied them up, and left them marooned, sometimes for hours, on an uninhabitable concrete island in the center of the lake. The Age of Sail! The grandmas yelled at us from the shore and balconies as we navigated between half-submerged metal beams and molding cement, but yell was just about all they could do until November, when the freeze and the snow drove the pirates to land for sled-racing season.
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I created the cover image for this 7”.
Black Face is the new project of founding Black Flag Bassist Chuck Dukowski and Oxbow vocalist Eugene Robinson. My band-mate from Insects vs. Robots, Milo Gonzalez, shreds the geetar.
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In The Land Of The Giants, Sequoia National Forest.
Elevation: 7000ft
Whipped this up last night.
On December 1st, my band Insects vs. Robots will be headlining the Del Monte Speakeasy. (The basement floor of the Townhouse. 52 Windward Ave, Venice, CA)
If you’re in L.A, you are invited. Paint your face berserker blue and come freak out with us! If you’re not in L.A, I feel bad for you son.
Image of the vortex street phenomenon by Birgitt Boschitsch, Peter Dewey, and Alexander Smits.
The Amazing Mr. Please Please himself! Live at the Apollo, October 24, 1962.
You can hear the human electricity. This album could wake you up from a coma.
Album cover art for the lovely Amy Ferguson and her music project Grandma Dirt. Released in April 2011.
A couple of favorites from my shoot for the album cover art for Blackface, the new music project of founding Black Flag bassist Chuck Dukowski and Oxbow singer Eugene Robinson.
My head buried in dirt all but for the face, I asked Wylie Vasquez Cable to activate the combat boot face-stop maneuver. These are chock full of genuine dirt n terror!
