Ephemera

A batch of random makings that I’m not ashamed of, in no particular order.

I’ll add to and/or subtract from this page from time to time, until none/neither of us remembers which was the original batch. Something to look forward to.

Dave Shulman - No Matter Who I Vote For, It Always Ends Up Nixon, 1985. 48 × 99 × 48 inches.

No Matter Who I Vote For, It Always Ends up Nixon, 1985

Auto parts, transparent plastic tubes and stylized receptacles (most from Solter Plastics) filled with colored water; non-functioning electrical circuitry, plaster cast of my legs and left hand, warehouse pallet, plaster, eucalyptus logs, curtains.
96 x 48 x 48 inches
Dave Shulman - The Black Knight (Job Interview), 1985. 52 × 30 × 42 inches.

The Black Knight (Job Interview), 1985

Plastic, masonite, plaster, coaxial cable, acrylic paint and its bucket.
52 x 30 x 42 inches
Silver Lake Land, L.A. Weekly spread, 1997. 13 × 22 inches.

Silver Lake Land: The Board Game You Don’t Play, 1997

L.A. Weekly spread. Written by Libby Molyneaux, Nancy Whalen and me.
I have no idea why — Libby probably remembers.
13 x 22 inches.

Radioactive Popcorn, 1985. (19 minutes)

Originally part of a video-installation performance that featured the timely delivery of several large, delicious pizzas. (Thanks again Brellis!)
Horrible quality. Mastered on 3/4-inch tape, this version was semi-rescued from a third- or fourth-generation 1/2-inch copy. Thrashed, but I messed with it enough to get a general idea.
Maybe these tidbits will make it less interesting:
The mailman is played by Jeffrey Vallance.
The music during the Gilbert Shelton homage (13:18) is “Abandoned Cities” by Harold Budd, from his 1984 album of the same name. I did not know Harold and used it without permission. Four years later, Harold and I were roommates, and he forgave me.
“Friend Dave” was played by a friend named Dave.
Dave Shulman - Trombonixon, 2011. 38 × 12 × 10 inches. ●

Trombonixon, 2011

Acrylic, gesso, coffee, on trombone case
(trombone included).
38 x 12 x 10 inches
L.A. Weekly's 2nd Annual List Issue (cover), 2002.

Cover, L.A. Weekly’s 2nd Annual List Issue, 2002

This was one of my favorite projects at L.A. Weekly. I got to conceive and edit the issue, design the cover, and lay out much of the interior, per Bill Smith’s design. The sorely missed Lewis MacAdams told me it was the only issue of the Weekly he’d ever read in its entirety. I’m assuming he meant the editorial content and not the cosmetic-surgery ads.

Name That Tune: Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour, 2023. (64 seconds)

In the late rainy morning of January 14, 2023, I arrived at DougH’s muddy hillside house to find the recent deluge had partly exposed a vinyl LP record in his backyard. DH had not lived there long and assumed the record had belonged to a prior tenant. By the time I arrived, he had fully excavated the disk and cleaned it with a powerful solvent called water.
Apart from most of the grooves being scratched to hell and one dramatic crack spanning the radius, the LP was in excellent condition.
DougH’s cave was packed full of most sound-making things I could imagine, and, as this was my first experience with Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour (an international improvisational real-time audio-collage and radio art event produced weekly in various forms by the eponymous collective since 1984), DH and I figured we should plop the surviving vinyl on a record player, crank it up and stream it live around the world, pronto, and that while it played, I should mosey about the cave and shoot some video. Later that day, I did some light editing at Hector Schechner’s studio.

“Recent Nixons,” 2011. Video tour of an exhibition. (2 minutes 22 seconds).

After my column was killed, I thought it would be a good idea to create some kind of something every day, a routine to focus on while I looked for new ways to stay alive. What I came up with was “Nixon of the Day” — every day (or so) I’d create some kind of Nixon-based image and post it on Facebook, which was like MySpace or Friendster, only more recent.
Three years into it, the curator of Elephant Art Space, a nonprofit gallery here in Los Angeles, invited me to have a show of Nixons there. The exhibit comprised selected Nixons of the Day as well as new Nixon-based artwork created for the show.
Thanks to Mike Watt for letting me over-edit this footage to the Minutemen’s “Spillage.”