I swung by the Museum of Jurassic Technology to meet David Wilson today, but sadly he’s out of town right now. Maybe next week. David is a friend of a friend, and his museum is one of my favorite places on Earth. I first went there in 1997 when my friends Bobby and Monica were in town to play a show. In the afternoon, before driving down to their show in San Diego they insisted we go to the MJT.
It blew me away.
My friend Steven suggested last week I meet David and see if he has any leads on the few remaining items we’re looking for. I jumped at the opportunity.

After that I went to the Hollywood Rubber Stamp Company, which has to be one of the coolest places in LA. It’s a shop where they make rubber stamps. You drop in with your files and they make a stamp very affordably in a day or so. It’s full of inks and pads and stamps and machines galore for making every size stamp imaginable.
They have a very friendly cat, as well.
Oh, and their website couldn’t be more misleading. It’s all corporate and sterile. But the actual offices are a complete inky, dark, breezy mess. You can see the machines in the back, everything is covered in stamps. It feels like they’ve been in the same place for a hundred years, and never really updated or cleaned anything. It’s fabulous, not dirty, cluttered fabulosity.

Then I went by Home Depot. I found exactly the type of doors we need for the confessional and for the swinging doors into the theater. And fortunately they’re inexpensive, $22 apiece. That’s good because, as of this morning, we’re probably close to $2,000 over budget. There are a lot of little things I missed and that are catching up with me.

I spent a couple hours with Susan at Fringe going over details. We also looked at the ad in Artillery. It is great.
We walked over to the parking lot on Hill St where a lot of the artists and gallerists park and spoke to Jose about parking arrangements. We’re renting 5 spaces for two weeks while the show goes up. We’ll have reserved spots. So frakking Hollywood, YES!

Then another Home Depot, this time to try and reserve scaffolding for the month of July. No doing, they don’t take reservations. We just have to get lucky. Which doesn’t sound good, because the guy said one of their two fifteen foot scaffoldings is busted.
We may have to go to Burbank or Pasadena to get scaffolding. And even there it’s a throw of the dice whether they’ll have it in stock when we need it.
I’ll start looking into alternate solutions to Home Depot tomorrow.

I dropped by both Bonelli Contemporary and Telic galleries. Both have shows with extensive public events, much like Disembody, in July. So I offered them free ads in our calendar. I reckon the more things people read about happening in Chinatown on Fridays and Saturdays, the better the turn out for all of our shows.
Plus it’s nice to be thoughtful and cooperative, imho.

Finally, I spoke with Jonny and Erin at length today. We’re getting candy worked out. They made a trip to Wal-Mart and bought them out of the candies we want.
Erin started the calendar this evening.
Jonny got the ephemera page looking all sweet and sexy.
And they got the joysticks for the arcades. Which are going to F*&%ing ROCK!
Oh, and all that during a hail storm that trashed Omaha and knocked the electricity out everywhere but inside Wal-Mart, apparently. Because Wal-mart has some special deal with the devil where they buy bulk evil and he keeps the lights on, Armageddon or no.
Here’s an amazingly strange rave video about it.
Here’s a news article.

I’m on the phone with Jonny as I write, and we have decided on the candies for the Morgellon theater!

Bottle Caps
Dots
Good N Plenty
Hot Tamales
Lemonheads
Mike & Ike
Skittles
SweeTarts

all screen printed in Omaha;

Whoppers
Sugar Babies
Milk Duds
Junior Mints

we will purchase and print in LA to try and avoid meltage of the delicious, delicious chocolate.

We’re also working out the design of the ephemera page.

Last night I visited Susan at Fringe. Jake was there. Sunday I’ll probably pick up the model from him.
We three spoke at length about the ceiling. Yesterday was all about the ceiling.
I think it’s safe to say that I was overthinking the ceiling, and that we were being overcautious.
With the ceiling panels being finished by Ket-Anne and Carol-Anne, we’re realizing that each four foot by eight foot section weighs maybe 10 or 15 pounds. And that hardly requires building a truss support structure sunk into the concrete walls of Fringe at multiple points and levels. Rather, it is perfectly safe to suspend it from the actual ceiling of Fringe, if we secure each panel to the plaster and lathe ceiling at numerous points.
The chandeliers will be attached to joists above the plaster and lathe. Sadly, Susan doesn’t think the joists are spaced regularly enough to use to install our ceiling.
Regardless, David and I are both very confident that we can safely affix our ceiling to Fringe’s, without spending several days building a support structure of steel and cables.

While at Fringe, Amy and I made a new set of measurements. Jake mentioned that he remeasured everything before doing the model because the measurements I gave him were so clearly cockamamie. I sent his dims along to David along with my own.

And finally, I received the news late last night that my mother is out of the hospital.
I have a deep abiding distrust of the medical establishment. Like everyone else in the world at this point.
My mother’s experience yesterday didn’t raise my opinion of the system.
Once she arrived for the emergency surgery, the surgeon took one look at her and sent her home. Turns out he hadn’t noted her age when reviewing her charts. And the surgery he proposed is so invasive they won’t do it on the elderly.
To top it off, he told her that this particular illness can also be relieved with a dietary change, but that’s always the secondary option after surgery. Not apparently because it’s a lesser alternative, just because they really like performing surgery.

Whatever, I suppose if I knew how to perform surgery I would want to do so, as well. As it is, instead I know how to create big, purposeless extravaganzas with no rhyme nor reason, and especially no social, political nor philosophical impact, so that’s what I do.
I’ll bet there is a dietary solution to the art world’s ills, as well. Maybe an artist’s diet book will be part of Portal Seven…

I do have two self-help books slated for 2009 as part of Portal Seven, and obvs I was never going to do just two because I don’t trust the number two. Three is a much better number for publishing.

Well, today we lost one game designer and gained another. Mitch was going to put together a Flash game for our arcade, but work has been overwhelming for him this Summer so he had to bow out.
Fortunately, Jonny has been wanting to make a Linux based game. And this is the perfect opportunity for him to do that now. He’s going to base it on the Linux version of Donkey Kong, skinned with the effluvia of Nightmare City.

I met with Susan today. We looked through the storage closet to see what needed to stay and what needed to go, since we’re turning it into a recording studio for the soundtrack of Disembody.
We also discussed what from her office needs to stay, and what needs to go, as that is going to be our IT station, sound station and projection booth.
LOL
Can you believe how amazingly accommodating she is being?

I met with another potential architectural model maker today, Jake Lee High. He is a friend of Susan’s, and an artist working in installation and sound. I’ve heard about his work at Fringe from friends, so it was a pleasure meeting him and hearing about his next project, which sounds fabulous.
With any luck I’ll have detailed drawings to him tomorrow, and then he can let me know what he thinks the cost of the model will be. Hopefully it will fall in our price range. Which is actually zero right now. But if he can do it for under 2K I think I’ll go ahead with it and just gamble that I can raise that much more money in four weeks.

I also met with Steve De Jarnatt, a friend of a friend. It looks like he’s going to help us out with some small amplifiers and some XLR cables. As well, we are borrowing a bunch of anechoic panels from him to baffle the recording studio. And to hopefully cut the bleed between the theater and the lobby.

Finally, I believe I found affordable theater seats at a prop house in the Valley. And they are purple, to match our theater color scheme.

All in all, a brilliant day.

I was away from the garoffice yesterday. What was I doing?

Monday night I BBQ’ed with Amy and our friend Mark Rodriguez. Mark’s been living and working in L.A. since getting out of school a couple years back. He does a lot of art installing, and works as an artist’s assistant a fair amount, as well. He makes a mean guacamole. I picked his brain about the L.A. art scene.
Later Amy and I reworked the Disembody and 23E logos. We made duotone graphics for stencils, stamps and screen prints.

Yesterday morning Amy and I went to Fringe to measure the space for the theater seats. That didn’t work out, as I don’t yet know the actual sizes of the seats. But, while there I realized I needed to flip the central wall dividing Fringe to create the theater and lobby spaces. That wall will diagonally bisect Fringe. In all my original plans I had it starting one third of the way along the left hand wall of Fringe and ending dead center on the right hand wall. Yesterday I realized it needs to angle not from left to right but from right to left. Hopefully that won’t be too big of an issue for the build crew.

After that revelatory trip to the gallery, I met with my friend Chuck, a film producer in L.A. He’s been helping out with contacts and advice.

Then I walked five miles back to the garoffice. I love walking in L.A. This is a truly beautiful city, chock full of people watching. An hour hoofing through L.A. is an hour well spent: Highland, Melrose, Fairfax, Wilshire, these are streets full of varying sights and sounds. I think a lot of people miss this aspect of L.A. We tend to think of New York as a walking city and L.A. as car-bound. But that’s not my experience here. Walking L.A. is just as fabulous as walking NY. Both cities offer a cornucopia of architecture and people and businesses to drink in.

In the evening I spoke with Jonny about the ephemera page, in particular the video going up at the archive. It also looks like Jonny is going to make some posters for the show as he learns to screen print. Turns out another of Erin’s many skills is screen printing.

It looks like we may have found some of the items we need for the recording studio. I’m meeting a friend of a friend this afternoon to look at his little home studio, and the gear he might loan out. As well, I’m meeting Jake, Susan’s friend, who might make our architectural model, this afternoon. And I have leads on two wireless lavaliers, which is a big deal, as sound is our greatest fear right now. All and all, everyone I know is really reaching out in an incredible manner as the deadline approaches for the opening. The generosity of the folks I know is rather overwhelming.

Last night I watched Ulrich Seidl’s Animal Love, which was simply beautiful. The more of his films I watch the more impressed I am. They are incredible portraiture.

I watched William Greaves’ The Fighters a couple nights ago. The fight I fast forwarded through because it was boring. Guess I’m not a boxing fan. But the observation up to that point was beautiful. I find I’m partial to documentaries that don’t (explicitly) say or do much, that seem pointless, plot-free.
Whether I’ll get anything remotely like that, I don’t know.

Which is why I LOVE this project!