Endless Bummer / Surf Elsewhere
Organized by Drew Heitzler
July 3 – August 28, 2010
Los Angeles
Opening reception: Saturday, July 3, 6-8pm
Billy Al Bengston, Justin Beal, Scott Benzel, Gil Blank, Jennifer Bornstein, Carol Bove, Cameron, Anne Collier, R. Crumb, Lucy Dodd, Sam Durant, Roe Ethridge, Amy Granat, Ed Kienholz, Margaret Kilgallen, Nate Lowman, John McCracken, Adam McEwen, Dave Muller, Aleksandra Mir, Catherine Opie, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Phillips, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Reena Spaulings, Vincent Szarek, Guyton \ Walker and Christopher Williams
With a video program by Drew Heitzler and a ‘zine with text by Jan Tumlir
Inherent Vice feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself. It reduces the byzantine complexities of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “V.” — and their juxtapositions of nihilism and conspiracy-mongering, Dionysian chaos and Apollonian reason, anarchic freedom and the machinery of power — to a cartoonish face-off between an amiable pothead, whose “general policy was to try to be groovy about most everything,” and a bent law-enforcement system. Not surprisingly, the reader is encouraged, as one character observes, referring to George Herriman’s "Krazy Kat” comic strip, to “root for Ignatz."
-- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Review
Los Angeles isn’t what I thought it would be. I guess I don’t really remember now what I expected when I moved here six years ago. But I knew better than to believe the movies. Still, you can’t help but glean at least an idea of a place from what you see on the screen. That was my mistake. I’m an artist and I’m a surfer, so I should have remembered that, with only a handful of exceptions, Hollywood never gets artists or surfers right. Same thing with Los Angeles, they play it all wrong. Maybe that’s because Hollywood is now, and always has been, over-run with so many East Coasters. The hills are full of the Ivy League, come to Los Angeles to conquer it, or worse, to fix it. Problem is they don’t get it. They use a double standard. I was no better, I didn’t get it either. I thought Los Angeles would be swell. It wasn’t exactly that.
So how does Thomas Pynchon get it so right? He’s from Long Island and he went to Cornell. He did live here for six years. Maybe that was enough. Maybe he still lives here. Maybe he’ll come to my show. There is a lot of chatter about “Inherent Vice” being the first Pynchon novel to be turned into a Hollywood film, so perhaps he’s in the neighborhood. Probably not. I’m sure it’s all been handed over to a couple of screenwriters who are busy making it camera ready. They’ll get it wrong. Hollywood doesn’t do nostalgia very well either, and “Inherent Vice”, the story of a stoner gumshoe set in that 1970 moment just after the Spahn Ranch arrests, is nostalgia of the weirdest kind. A paranoid trek across our whacked-out city and a psychedelic lens through which we may view our current state of affairs, or maybe just a dark mirror reflecting the freeway haze, the offshore Santa Ana flow, and the summer sun. Either way, it’s a story that feels like the Los Angeles that I learned to love, the Los Angeles that Angelenos love, sprawling and unexpected, soft-focus and prone to disaster, an awesome endless bummer. … Surf elsewhere.
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In the 2012 time travel movie "Looper," the main character Joe (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a convincing facial prosthetic) sacrifices himself to change the future. He aims to prevent his older self (Bruce Willis) from killing a child named Cid who is destined to become future villain with unique telekinetic powers— known as The Rainmaker. In the final scene, Cid is grazed by a bullet, but younger Joe’s shoots himself to make older Joe disappear from the timeline— offering the possibility of a different timeline and future outcome for the boy. 🎥
In 1893, Ingersoll Lockwood wrote “Baron Trump's Marvellous Underground Journey”, a tale about young Baron Trump's quest to find a "world within a world." Lockwood’s second book, published in 1896, was titled “1900, Or The Last President.” 🎥
Also in “Looper”, Young Joe/JGL carves a message into his own arm, which appears as a scar on the arm of his future self, Old Joe/Bruce. To communicate a meeting location across time, he carves the name "Beatrix," who was the waitress at a roadside café he often frequented. This choice of name is likely a reference to a line from Thomas Pynchon's book “V.”, which mentions "barmaids named Beatrix" as being the "fairest and saddest." 🎥
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"Call all the barmaids Beatrice and all the boys Benedick; I’m weary of staring in these mirrors of the human condition. What shall it profit a man if he gain his own soul but lose the world? Or, worse, what if you gain the world and lose only your car keys?"
"Why are the fairest always the saddest, with barmaids named Beatrix, or midgets in pubs?"
In Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Inherent Vice” (and Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation), there’s a subplot involving the improbable collaboration between the Aryan Brotherhood (a white nationalist group) and the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF, a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary black power organization). These prison gangs, typically on polarized opposite sides of racial/ideological lines, find common ground within the labyrinthine and absurd conspiracy driving the novel’s plot, reflecting the surreal nature of 1960s counterculture where biker movies were an important trope about individual freedom.
🎥
Fast forward to 2024, TikTok is lit up with videos of Hells Angels and Outlaws riding to Aurora, Colorado, to confront Venezuelan prison gangs that have taken over neighborhoods (stay tuned). Similar videos are surfacing of Chicago street gangs warning these same Venezuelans about moving into CHI under the same sanctuary city laws as Colorado. 🎥
One iconic 1960s biker movie about rival gangs forming an unholy alliance against a common threat is “The Glory Stompers” (1967). In this film, two rival biker gangs—the Glory Stompers, led by Chino, and the Black Souls, led by Darryl—start off at odds. But when law enforcement becomes the shared enemy (plot-twist, 2024 is the lawless opposite), the gangs grudgingly unite to face the larger threat.
🎥
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The cover art for the Bitcoin Magazine “Privacy Issue” is loosely inspired by a famous book cover of Franz Kafka's “The Trial”— a novel about a man arrested without knowing his crime, oppressive bureaucracy, unchecked surveillance, and the erosion of autonomy. If you get the mag, I highly recommend Alex Fulton's mind-bending article, "Give Me Time."
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Artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000). His interlock drawings are detailed visual representations that map out complex networks of financial transactions, political connections, and power structures. In his work related to the Iran-Contra affair, Lombardi illustrated how shell companies and banks were used to covertly move money and facilitate arms sales, revealing the intricate web of relationships between government officials, private entities, and financial institutions involved in the scandal. His drawings highlight the secretive mechanisms and financial maneuvers that enabled illegal activities and the circumvention of oversight.
His “interlock” drawings, which resemble flowcharts or diagrams, are influenced by methods typically used in forensic accounting and legal professions to track connections and transactions, and has often been referred to as conceptual or “investigative art”.
Mark Lombardi died on March 22, 2000, at the age of 48 (weeks before his first major museum exhibition and six months before 9/11). He was found hanging from a beam in his studio in Brooklyn, NY, and his death was officially ruled a suicide. However, due to the nature of his work—which involved exposing connections between powerful figures, corporations, and illicit activities— there has long been speculation that he was murdered. His drawings were studio by the FBI after 9/11 and several thousand of his index cards used to document is research were confiscated. Much of his archive is now held by New York museums, including MoMA and the Whitney.
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By chance, I happened to see his first museum inclusion at the "Greater New York" show at PS1 in 2000 while visiting NY. At the time, I was unfamiliar with his career or that he had just died. Later, one of his large drawings was included in a 2014 exhibition at a gallery where I worked in LA. The book “Global Networks” about his artwork, is a rare find, and remarkable.
My wife was just telling me that Moonlighting holds up really well! I had vague childhood memories of Miami Vice and “V” (or V the Final Battle), both still excellent
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