Bedlam Magazine and bedlammagazine.com publisher Jim Fittipaldi caught up with artist Robert Vargas at Seventh & Grand, a nightclub in Downtown Los Angeles, on a recent Tuesday evening.This particular night Robert was painting to the rhythm of a live jazz band.In effect, Vargas’ painting was integrated into the act and was as much a part of the show as the drummer or guitarist. Between sets Vargas sat down with Fittipaldi for a little Q &A about art and the city:
JF:Let's talk a little about you...
RV:You mean in terms of my work?
JF:In terms of your work, your lifestyle -- I seem to run into you every time I’m out! You went to school on the East coast.Was it NYU?
RV:No, I went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
JF:Tell me about this statement you made to me earlier today about “a connection with the city”?
Jim Marquez regularly crosses the bridge to downtown from East L.A. in search of art, debauchery and a good story. New pieces by Mr. Marquez will appear here, unedited and unexpurgated (cover your ears, children) every week or so and will eventually appear in book form.
What Will The Neighbors Think?
By Jim Marquez
Drinks @ a Downtown LA bar. What night? Thursday? Yeah, a good night to head out. Cop radars are down. Only the “normals” wait until Friday. I haven’t been normal in a long, long time. Fuckin’ blessed, baby, that’s what I am. And goddamn lucky too.
She was a “fan”, found me on Facebook. I am flattered. What the hell? See where it goes. Buy the ticket & all that…
Manic, spirited chat, she doesn’t drink much, fine, I order a half dozen Jameson-rocks, more than I wanted, usually taken care of at another place but closed for some reason so forced to come to this joint and the bill is 80-fucking-dollars. Goddamn. Better be worth it.
Walk her to her car? Sure, honey. Let’s go. Some grab ass & sloppy kisses back at the bar make me want more. But my car’s on the street, she says. No problem; park in that lot, I suggest, it’s after 1am, the attendant is gone. In the dark, yeah, right here…
Jim Marquez regularly crosses the bridge to downtown from East L.A. in search of art, debauchery and a good story. New pieces by Mr. Marquez will appear here, unedited and unexpurgated (cover your ears, children) every week or so and will eventually appear in book form.
Car out of sorts of late, bussing it, hoofing it, Metros. Not bad once you get used to the schizophrenic schedules. Great to get my ass out of recklessly wheeling home though after having enough to put an elephant down, but, at the same time knowing I don’t have to drive leads to more than I should, longer than I should, and, so, consequently, I find myself stumbling home at 8am, 8:30am, Friday & Sunday mornings now. Hell, even on Easter Sunday when the moms were dragging their brats to services! There I was: another brown stain on the streets of L.A.
And here we are NOW: the last drunkard on earth, poking my head out of yet another loft, yet another “after”, dreadfully late, parading down the streets closed for the “Fiasco Broadway”.
Why the fuck don’t they ever tell anybody about this crap? NO PARKING signs just ain’t good enough, I’m sorry. POSTERS should be plastered EVERYWHERE DAYS AHEAD OF TIME! I’m busy, I can’t keep track of every goddamn downtown event, especially when it doesn’t even fly into my arena of coverage, you know?
Jim Marquez regularly crosses the bridge to downtown from East L.A. in search of art, debauchery and a good story. New pieces by Mr. Marquez will appear here, unedited and unexpurgated (cover your ears, children) every week or so and will eventually appear in book form.
My first piece in this ‘Rumblings’ series trolled Chinatown, the second was in Downtown, but this tale be told IS actually from the Eastside…
Near midnight, during the week,a taco truck on a main drag by my house in East L.A. I’m talking just ONE long block-and-a-half from my front door. The tacos here cost less than a buck, they’re fresh & plentiful, and, on the way home from wherever the fuck I am Sunday-Wednesday, it’s goddamned convenient.
I think it was after a show by photog Rick Mendoza. I don’t remember. It was definitely after I put on a good drunk at my new haunt over at “Cole’s” on 6th Street. God bless those fuckers! But it was early still, shouldn’t be driving around so soon after closing; amateur hour on my part. Stop. Park the car. Walk somewhere. But what the fuck is open at 2:17am around these parts? Tacos Mexico? No; too far down; too early for that. I still wanted more booze. Actually, I wanted to hit the new “after” down here but those bastards barely opened for the night, don’t wanna be the first one in, not cool. Would seem too eager, too desperate, wanted to give it 30 minutes or so, let the drunken honeys convince themselves they want more of whatever the hell else they thought they were getting by prancing around half-naked-coming up at three in the fuckin’ morning-to stagger in, and so I jumped off the road and slotted myself into a parking lot off of Hill Street to hide.
Jim Marquez regularly crosses the bridge to downtown from East L.A. in search of art, debauchery and a good story. New pieces by Mr. Marquez will appear here, unedited and unexpurgated (cover your ears, children) every week or so and will eventually appear in book form.
The Edge of Chinatown
By Jim Marquez
It was supposed to be an “after party” of sorts, just a few of the boys slugging back beers & shots after the Chinatown bars had closed. Some dude had a birthday party at one of the bars and knew he’d be too fucked up to drive home so he had grabbed a motel room in advance of the night’s drinking.
The Hive is aptly named for a collective showcase located physically and spiritually on the bleeding edge of Los Angeles’s Gallery Row. Half the space divides into miniature studios occupied by the eclectic group’s resident artists.
Each studio doubles as an exhibition space, so each cell is a window into the artist’s mind. Disparate displays of styles, tones, attitudes and art infuse the gallery and at the center of all of this creative commotion is the king bee, Nathan Cartwright, the smiling guy who radiates The Hive’s restless enthusiasm.
In 1950, Lillian Ross published a profile of Ernest Hemingway in the New Yorker. The story was remarkable largely because it did not strive to be remarkable. Hemingway was an international celebrity, and needed very little introduction. Ross chose, therefore, to follow him around New York for three days, taking careful notes. The action of the article is minimal, limited really to conversations between Hemingway and various characters—including Marlene Dietrich—holding court in a suite at the Ritz Carlton, at Abercrombie & Fitch, where Hemingway went reluctantly to buy a coat and underwear, and finally, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As colorful East L.A. murals streamed by outside his bus, high schooler Alex Poli was tagging inside. Poli’s weapons of choice were Posca Paint, Uni and Mean Streak markers; his nickname Man One came from a shortened version of Mantronix, the hip-hop band he was obsessed with.
Tagging led to graffiti, which led to graffiti art, and Man One went from busses, to walls, to college, to a career. Today he paints public and private murals. He’s commissioned for graphic design work and illustration. He creates corporate brands and logos and designs for the likes of MTV, Coca-Cola, Adidas and Vans. It’s a little surreal, his schedule of live painting gigs at corporate parties, bar mitzvahs and rock tours — paid spectacles crafted out of the same act that would have once landed him in jail.
Behind the stage at a small theater in downtown Los Angeles, Matt Aston’s shadow is projected on scrim. He has horns and a tail. He is some kind of non-specific mythical being, a vaguely rural deity with New World overtones about to be consumed by his carnivorous brother in the climactic scene of the world premier of “Tiny Trumpets,” a new play by Padua Playwrights veteran Heidi Darchuk, for which Aston also designed the set.
On September 11th, artist Peter Haskell was shot and killed by a former roommate during a dispute in the loft they had shared on Main Street near Chinatown. He was 51. There are varying theories among Peter’s friends about what led to the shooting – but there were no witnesses and the roommate was released and no charges are pending at the moment.
Trying to leave Los Angeles. Fight my way out. Months of preparation somehow. Heading east for the winter. Still a lot to get out of this apartment. Filling up the car with what I'll need. Barb, the librarian I've lived with will be sad and relieved upon arriving home from work and finding I've finally got out. So will the neighbors witho0ut the sad. Another foray into the hinterlands in questionable vehicle. Ahh, this piece of Kraut machinery won't break down. It's got around a quarter million on it but that means, for kraut machinery, it's barely broken in. Some guy in like Istanbul, a cab driver, just drove the same model two million. It's going to be hot crossing Arizona and it's that Mexican twenty-eight dollar tire I'm worried about. I've done my eyeball string line front-end alignment (I've got it down, I never hire mechanics or anyone for fifty dollars an hour) but I think a suspension bushing or two may be cause for worry. Moneywise, I've got a pocket with a wad of hundreds in it because I sold a painting to a guy in New York this week. Bills have been flying out though in preparation for this run. How much is left?
It’s just nerves and synapses the doctor said
I’ve gone astray again
Frayed nerves, lack of soul food, lapses
Try to focus-pick up your pen
Call upon your muse
So I light my cigarette with a blowtorch
A doctor gave me my first cigarette
Some people roll their own
I’d like to be an F-16… I’d like to kick ass against an Abrams tank… and Robert Downey Jr. has just enough attitude to work for me as a surrogate-hero. Iron Man was fun to watch, in other words. Sure, lots of racial stereo-typing going on with the evil Muslim-types …but then the real embodiment of evil turns out to be Jeff Bridges, uber-Capitalist. All in all the film is a standard-issue, left-leaning, post-Spielberg/Lucas pop-culture myth. Which means that Director Jon Favreau has both feet firmly planted in the over-cultivated soil of Joseph Campbell’s seminal The Hero of a Thousand Faces.
Paris: The Picasso Museum
by Jim Marquez (with apologies to Henry Miller)
Not for nothing, but I masturbated in the gardens of Versailles once after I spied upon a young woman, maybe 20 years old, hike up her skirt, pee under a tree a golden stream long enough to make a racehorse blush, and then left, giggling, thinking no one else saw her do this but her drunk girlfriend.
Ron English is a New York-based artist whose subversive billboards have been popping up around the country for years, provoking all kinds of entertaining speculation about what he is trying to communicate. The most memorable is a perfectly-crafted mockery of the Apple ‘Think Different’ billboard and magazine campaign that featured the face of someone known as an original thinker accompanied by the text “think different” and the ubiquitous striped Apple logo. Ron’s billboard looked exactly like the Apple ads – except the image was of Chares Manson. He is also a masterful painter whose pop interpretations of Picasso’s Guernica are undoubtedly post-modern masterpieces.
In the audience a man was holding a poster that depicted a solemn Obama, with his head tilted, gazing wistfully into the ephemera, or in this unique case, back at Obama himself. Below his bust was printed the word HOPE. The crowd seemed to have anticipated Obama’s acknowledgment of the image, because as he did so they erupted into applause. The man with the sign, Yosi Sargent, felt uncomfortable with the sudden attention.
By Kristin Friedrich, Bedlam Magazine
Behind the stage at a small theater in downtown Los Angeles, Matt Aston’s shadow is projected on scrim. He has horns and a tail. He is some kind of non-specific mythical being, a vaguely rural deity with New World overtones about to be consumed by his carnivorous brother in the climactic scene of the world premier of “Tiny Trumpets,” a new play by Padua Playwrights veteran Heidi Darchuk, for which Aston also designed the set.
Peter Haskell: In Memoriam
Smoke Gets In My Eyes
Not for nothing, but I masturbated in the gardens of Versailles once after I spied upon a young woman, maybe 20 years old, hike up her skirt, pee under a tree a golden stream long enough to make a racehorse blush, and then left, giggling, thinking no one else saw her do this but her drunk girlfriend.
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” -- Scott Adams
