Afterword.

Big thanks to everyone who made it out on Monday night for the big Gary Panter event! Standing room only, loud music, hours of drawing and hanging, and we almost completely sold out of our copies(two signed copies left!). It was mega success fitting a mega rad man and artist. L.A., you rule.
P.S. Above photo by Coop!

Cheryl Dunn Infomercial on Gary Panter

Cheryl shot this little promotional video for Gary's new book.



And check out this flier Devin Flynn did for the Family show! Monday night!



Here's a video Devin did for Erase Errata:



And a cartoon from his internet show Y'all So Stupid:

Cluster Tour Poster Show

It'll hang for the next two weeks. Thanks Alison!

Gary Panter destroys L.A.

Next Monday, the 26th of May, the great Gary Panter is coming to Family in conjunction with his long awaited mega tome from Picture Box.
Things kick off with a musical performance from Gary and artist Devin Flynn, followed by a chance to get your copy signed by the man himself. But wait! After that, The Cinefamily is going to host a night of movies curated by Gary.
Gary Panter is, without a doubt, one of the most influential artists of the last 40 years, as cartoonist, designer, painter, musician, sculptor, and even light show maker. He helped define the aesthetic of punk rock with his work with Slash Magazine and numerous punk rock covers and posters, has won Emmy's for his design of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, has done light shows with Alan Licht, drawn some of the best comics ever made, and still made a career for himself as a fine arts painter who has exhibited all over the world (most recently in the joint Mocca/Hammer Masters of American Cartooning show). Hugely influential and ahead of the curve, Gary Panter has shaped the world you live in whether you know it or not. And, in his mid-fifties, is still going strong with the kind of artistic vigor that leaves artists half his age cowering in awe.
So Monday night, mark the date, come out for a rad night of books, music, and movies with a legendary artist!

Two shows in two days!

Tuesday, 20 May at 8pm

Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive to Death
&
The Cave Singers

Two bands all the way from Seattle!



Triumph of Lethargy:
"A sparse, cantankerous dirge continuously plows through emotional selvage with minimalist instrumentation and extraterrestrial sound effects. Sounds best when utterly, completely alone."

and:

"The Cave Singers make beautifully anguished acoustic music that has been compared to Townes Van Zandt and Fleetwood Mac (singer Peter Quirk sure does sound a lot like Stevie Nicks sometimes)."

Then on Wednesday, 21 May at 8pm

Pre-Cluster Party and Poster Art Show!

Featuring new posters for the Cluster tour by Jim Drain, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Alison Childs, Rick Froberg, Tim Koh, Bert Bergen, Mike Calvert, Hisham Bharoocha, Harrison Haynes, and many more!

With live performances by:

Ariel Pink
&
Anavan

Pre-Cluster Show Poster Party

Brother Reade in San Francisco this weekend

Naked on the Vague

This Sunday, May 11 at 8pm Naked on the Vague will be playing the store. They are old friends from Sydney, and I have seen their music develop into the very singular and visionary concept it is today. This is how their Australian label Dual Plover describes them:

"Diving deep into a world of apocalyptic pop and psychedelic weirdness, their disparate vocals grip onto stabbing keys and menacing hook-laden basslines, pushed on by an unrelentling drum machine far past the end of its warranty period. Essentially a ‘punk’ assault ranging from some almost dance-able short and sharp ‘hits’ to gloomy extended freak-outs. Taking direction from where the short lived 'no-wave' movement ended, expanding on what the imploded scene may have garnished had it not succumbed to its own fatalistic shortcomings."



Band member Mathew Hopkins is also an amazing artist and keeps a well maintained blog of his projects that you can check out here:

Dark Hand and Lamplight-your second chance.

The audience of last Wednesday night's Dark Hand and Lamplight show had their collective minds blown. For those of you who stayed home, dont worry-you have one more chance to check this amazing performance, this time at the Hammer Museum in Westwood-Wednesday the 7th of May. The show is free and starts at 8pm.
Not to be missed.
The above photo comes courtesy of Eric Kroll (nsfw).

Nouns Out Today

Here's the opening part of the Pitchfork review that gave the record a 9.2

It's disingenuous to talk about Los Angeles' New Yorker-profiled, vegan-snacks-serving, book-lending, all-ages venue the Smell with the same high-art vocabulary you'd use to dissect other creative collectives, like Andy Warhol's Factory-- the Smell's constituency (L.A.'s optimistic experimental art pack) appears un-fixated on fame, self-aggrandizement, or furthering its nascent mythology. To an outsider, the Smell is idealistic and romantic, a stroller-friendly, cheap-haircut-hocking haven that's as functional as it is fruitful. Save Baltimore's Wham City, it's been a while since American music fans have had a similar hometown scene to get riled up about; regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the internet, and being too focused on anything local-- except produce, maybe-- feels depressingly provincial in 2008. Consequently, it's weirdly thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands.

No Age, along with Mika Miko, Abe Vigoda, Lavender Diamond, BARR, and a handful of others, are mainstays at the Smell; the cover of No Age's 2007 EP compilation, Weirdo Rippers, famously features the exterior of the club, and guitarist Randy Randall reportedly helped mine trenches in the venue's concrete floor so that a second bathroom could be installed to accommodate new crowds. Given the critical success of Weirdo Rippers, No Age's scope has now expanded well beyond Los Angeles, and Nouns, their first full-length, is appropriately ambitious.

The rest