teatro de los muertos

The Flyer (Tom's on left, Michael's on right)

Michael has been living in the garage for the past six months. I suppose "garage" is a poor term for the building. Really, it's a redwood-plank shack that would probably have fit a Model T once, if you didn't have to open the doors. More precisely, it's a shack with two electric wheelchairs, a barcolounger, a disco ball with saturn rings, wall to wall carpeting, an enormous subwoofer, and an incredible amount of... stuff. And Tom. Tom is also always out there. In fact, Tom and Michael are so often in the shack, they've dubbed it the MAN SHACK. When people come over, they rarely even bother to come to the front door anymore. The living room hasn't seen guests in weeks, but there's almost always somebody sitting in the barcalounger out in the man shack, being uh, manly, or something.

One of Tom's Collages

The MAN SHACK, since it was rid of cobwebs and moldy furniture left behind by the old neighbors, has also been the source of endless creativity. Tom, it turns out, is rather handy with an X-Acto knife and has been making some really insane collages out of religious icons and old Time-Life books. Michael is making dioramas from pretty much anything he can get his hands on. Except for tonight, tonight he's making a drum set out of a banjo and some pots I think he found next to the trash pile. I'm hoping he gets over that one soon. Quite a racket. (He would like me to point out it is a racket with excellent rhythm, however.)

Bigger on the Inside Than the Outside

Anyway. The volume of work Michael and Tom have created has reached something of a critical mass. So much so that they ran out of shelves to put them on, then they ran out of places to put new shelves. So, a couple weeks ago, they opened a show of their work, entitled Teatro de los Muertos, at Red's. Being that Halloween and Dia de los Muertos are just around the corner, there are lots of skeletons and Day of the Dead references. Also lots of gold spray paint and shoe goo, but I don't think that had so much to do with the timing of the show.

The opening was great. Lots of people came, though inexplicably almost none of them were people we'd specifically sent invitations to. Most all of them had picked up a flyer somewhere and come by to see the art. Tom and Michael weren't expecting quite so many people who were there not just to drink free wine and humor their friends. They also weren't expecting to sell anything, and were pleasantly surprised when they did.

Michael and Theater of War

Michael took several of the early people around to explain each of his dioramas, which are a whole lot more complicated than they look. I know, hard to believe. I did get a kick out of my dad trying to explain "Theater of War" to our friend Nicky after getting the Tour (So.. Jesus is a DJ, see here? And he's 'dropping the bomb' - that's a DJ term! Did you know that was a DJ term? And that's the bomb, the bomb is a nuclear bomb... See?)

The Fishing Channel

The photographs of the artworks don't even pretend to do them justice. For one thing, you can't press any of the buttons or light them up or watch the little mechanized things go round. As promised, here's a picture of the radio cabinet we got for $20 from David-Beckham-who-is-not-the-footballer, for example. The cabinet now has a lake in it, and a skeleton fishing for an ever-elusive anglerfish with a disco ball, which swims underwater past the lower window once every minute or so. Apparently words don't do it justice either. Needless to say, there was generally a crowd around it giggling every time the fish came round chasing a disco ball.

No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind and Michael's Dada Shrine both had not-so-obvious push-buttons. The former lights up and lets off a horrible racket as little psychotic looking dolls aim machine guns at you. Everybody who presses it immediately thinks they broke it. The Dada Shrine has a spinning Ken doll head (Not! A! Real! Ken! Doll! Don't! Sue! Us! Mattel!) and a REAL 'COON SKULL, which we procured from a really scary redneck in an unblogged section of our roadtrip last winter which went through Quartzsite. But I digress.

Dadaist Shrine

Michael and Tom never have really considered themselves Artists (Tom's a journalist, Michael's aiming toward a degree in social work), so they weren't very practiced with the scholarly, esoteric explanations for the fine art aficionados in the room. One woman very seriously asked Tom about the recurring circle motifs in his work. "Because circles are easy to cut out?" he says. Michael explained to another art patron that his main source of inspiration is the dollar store. Quite a few people wrote long, well-thought-out critiques and put them in the suggestion box, only to realize it was actually a paper shredder when their comments came out in strips at the bottom.

Another of Tom's Collages

Since Tom and Michael, who usually DJ, were obviously preoccupied, I dusted off my old super-sine-wavy-circa-1995 ambient music collection for the first time in almost 10 years and played them all night. Toward the end, I played Charles Dodge and Weird Blinking Lights simultaneously and I think maybe nobody appreciated it except me. Actually, I'm pretty sure nobody did, because Dana came by to tell me to play it louder so more people would leave and she could close up.

If you happen to be in Santa Barbara, the show (by Tom Schultz and Michael Long for those who don't know who the hell I'm talking about) is going to be up through the second week in November at Red's Espresso Bar and Gallery, 211 Helena Street at the corner of Yanonali Street. They'll also be in another show at the end of November in a temporary gallery space in the Funk Zone, but I don't have the details for that yet.

Twenty-Six Soldiers

I'm almost completely done moving into the studio. Through random chance, I checked my email not long before we were leaving on the first trip up from LA with the U-Haul (and all my furniture). It just so happened that the one new email I had was from a guy in the Valley selling a fully restored Chandler and Price Pilot Press. I called. We haggled. I said, I'll come pick it up right now. He said sure, plus I'll throw in a bunch of other stuff. I almost peed myself.

M and I unceremoniously shoved the red couch out of the back of the U-Haul to make more room and drove straight to Canoga Park, where I scored not just a lovely Pilot on its own rolling stand, but a type cabinet, several cases of type, box after box of random printing ephemera and a couple extra typefaces. M pointed out the cool vintage radio cabinet in the living room, and he offered it to us for another $20. M is now in the garage turning it into another art piece. More on that later.

The Vandercook also arrived safely, thanks to my favorite super-cute Jim Salazar and Company employee, a giant flatbed truck and a pallet jack. He even moved the iron lung galley cabinet for the low-low cost of a sandwich. The rusty ginormous non-OSHA-approved-lose-an-arm guillotine paper cutter has been disposed of (no room, no desire to fix it).

Everything fits. The DSL works. I have a place to go to work that isn't my house. I had this incredible realization at about quarter to nine on Monday morning that for the first time in over four years, I can actually go to work. The couch will miss me, as will the laptop, but I've had enough of working in my bathrobe at noon.

So, first order of business is unpacking and arranging and figuring out what I need and what I don't. The fact that both presses came with a bunch of random stuff the previous owners clearly wanted to rid themselves of in bulk has left me with lots of duplicates and more than one box of tools I can't figure out how to use. The best part of going through this, though, has been organizing the type. I'm planning on getting rid of a lot of it, as is evidenced by my huge number of ebay auctions. Some of it is conveniently labeled with the face, manufacturer and size - some even in its original packaging. Others, mostly what I got with the galley cabinet, are mysterious and defy identification. If anybody reading has ninja master type-spec skills, help in identifying the faces below is appreciated. I'm pretty sure the one at the bottom right is ATF Stylescript. I forgot to reverse a couple of the images - that's why some are backwards (correct) and some are forward (easier to identify).

It's been a lovely, meditative week so far, alphabetizing, cleaning, organizing, sorting, wiping years of dust and old ink off with a rag soaked in horribly toxic solvents. I wouldn't trade this for the world.