funhouse,
I recently saw a documentary about the Stooges, a band I’ve always liked, but didn’t know exhaustively the way I do other bands. This was likely because I only had one album. Their first one, done in New York with John Cale. I got it while in college, and likely John Cale as the producer was a big reason why I got it. I’ve always loved it, the drone song, the guitar solo in Ann. I knew there were three other albums, but I thought, incorrectly, that Ron Asheton stopped playing guitar after the first one, and to me he was the best part. And I had heard a song or two from other albums and didn’t like the more dense production. So for 20 years I was just fine with 1969, Real Cool Time, and Little Doll. But after seeing this documentary, and telling a friend about how I didn’t like the other albums, I ventured into their 2nd— Fun House. lots of good songs, and Fun House in particular was very good. A good mix of noise and throbbing rhythm. Iggy lyrics are similar to early Can lyrics— very minimal and simple, and their feeling exist more in the delivery and performance then their overt poetry. Though that said, in their dumbness, life truths are told.
Generally when I do shows I spend a pretty good amount, a year or so—in a lot of cases after a show at a gallery I am immediately thinking about the next show at said gallery—of time curating, in a sense, from the works that I have laying around my studio, from recently finished to random things from back the early 2000s. This show was a bit weird in that during the past 6 months I was in the process of a protracted studio move so wasn’t able to see my paintings, so things were put together in a much more “I think this would go with that” sort of way based on my memory of each, through this distortion that memory can create. Fun House.
Politics these past few months have been haywire, especially with our recent election, and while not wanting to tie this to that, I will say it had been difficult to work in a studio after so much time spent each day reading about things on the internet. It becomes an anxiety loop— stress of the country fed into constant internet refreshing creating anxiety through this neurological process of ongoing instantaneous news— as if reading a new headline 15 minutes sooner is going to change anything. The cliche of the funhouse mirror seems none-theless apropos. Things like honesty and norms, even in the slippery world of politics, seem so out of whack. How else to deal except through the squealing of feedback and saxophones? Dada came out of WWI as atrocities could only be digested as absurdities.