ANIMALS MAGAZINE ISSUE 1

“CONTROL” BY KIM FOWLEY (MERCURY, 1978)
A.K.A. IRON CROSS “LITTLE BIT O’ SOUL”
(SPARK, 1972)

And here’s a DIFFERENT Iron Cross song, trans-
formed into the de facto single from the Sunset Bou-
levard album, released in Europe with a stridently
unrehearsed picture sleeve and Kim’s “punk disco”
song “The Top” as a B-side.

While “Control” is another case of vocal transplant,
it’s also as close to a clear statement of purpose as
Kim ever put out. (Or as he explained in the Sunset
Boulevard liners, it’s about “the illusion of technique,
swallowed up by progress.”)

Over a glammy rework of that “Little Bit O’ Soul”
riff, Kim powers through a punishing set of “I am ...”
lyrics: “I am ... the star who drives a dark car / I am ...
the robot made out of steel / I am ... your nightmare,
I do what I feel / I am the nowhere, I am the red hair
/ I am the crazy ...” And of course: “I’m in control,”
repeated til you submit.

By the end, he’s shifted into his freaks-unite mode: 49
“If you are ugly, you ought to be free—cuz I’m in
control, and you’re ugly like me!” Which nicely sets
the tone for the rest of our next entry ...

“MIDNIGHT MOVIES” BY FRANKENSTEIN AND THE
ALL STAR MONSTER BAND (SONET, 1984)

Extremely unknown Fowley project with with no
official credit. Instead, he’s double-billed as “Doctor
Dogg as Frankenstein,” leading a band including
“Video Pig,” “Larry Lizard” and a whole roster of
monsters plucked from the wasteland of late-nite
basic cable.

“MOTORBOAT” BY JIMMY JUKEBOX “WILD BOYS” BY NEIL NORMAN But if you look at the single sleeve, you’ll spot that
(CHATTAHOOCHIE, 1973 / SONET, 1978) (GNP CRESCENDO, 1974) unmistakable (and yes, Frankensteinian) Fowley
face staring balefully back. Conceptually, this is the
What a hit. Fowley was at his best free-associating Neil Norman was the son of Gene Norman, the equivalent of a Halloween episode of the Twilight
nasty nonsense within the barest framework of GN behind the label GNP, as well as the auteur Zone where we find out humans were the real
trend and genre, as in: “Oh, you people like songs responsible for the mighty bad-trip “Phaser Laser,” monsters all along. It’s posed as a novelty project,
about motorcycles and A-sides by the Sweet? Here, an elite entry in the unforgiving field of Roky Erick- but actually concerned deeply with the ennui and
gag on this!” son-but-actually-not 45s. alienation Frankensteins and Video Pigs face in their
daily lives. (That’s a one-step-past-reality metaphor
for the freaks and outsiders who were one of Fow-
ley’s favorite demographics.)

Of course, Kim goes one step beyond - if you like He was also a fellow traveler with Fowley - he told Musically, it’s pretty much Ariel Pink 25 years
motorcycles, you have to love motorboats, right? - me so himself, when I ran into him on a sidewalk in before the fact - an all-instinct riff on post-punk-lite
and torpedos even the most juvenile hits Chinnichap Santa Monica with bottomless boxes of Seeds CDs rhythm and pop melody with endearing low-budget
ever published with flanger-ed lyrics going: “Punk in the trunk of his car - and collaborated with Kim production and superior spiel-surreal from Fowley,
rock fugitive / brave and bold in the zone of clones / on this lurching mid-tempo troglodytic cock-rocker conducting roll-call interviews as a Frankenstein’s
... / shampoo your head in a hurry / let’s go dance in about wild boys taking over no-man’s land that Monster with an inexplicable hillbilly accent:
a fury ...” And so on, of course. bullseyes right between Alice Cooper and contem- “Where’d ya find all that blue mud?” “... in the classi-
porary space-rocker Neil Merryweather. (Great fied ads in the canyons of my mind.” (Fittingly, Ariel
This is exactly what collectors now call junkshop fuzz-and/or-Moog break, too.) put Kim on his 2014 album pom pom, settling that
glam - no-hitters by people who wanted to be cosmic debt with style.)
Sweet or Slade or something - except funnier and This was deservedly comped on one of the Bone-
without the smothering neediness that comes when head Crunchers series, but isn’t too hard to turn Somehow Gilby Clarke (pre-G’n’R) and Chris Dar-
you can tell the artist actually hoped you might like up in the real world. B-side “Tits From Mars” is an row (of the L.A.-area psych Kaleidoscope) are part
their work. Fuck that - as the man says, ‘Don’t jive / overcranked instrumental that somehow delivers of the ensemble players here. Ripe for reissue, but
stay alive!’ Covered faithfully and to great effect by everything the title promises. what label could be this brave?
some incarnation of Redd Kross.





52

KILL. FUCK. PLAY.

Illustration by: Simon McLoughlin

20MISSION / THE BIRTH OF BITCOIN

LAST NIGHT I MIGHT HAVE GOTTEN DRUNK WITH SATOSHI NAKAMOTO

Written by: Dave Reeves
Photos courtesy of Missy Pulley

53

Got a tip that the man who invented Bitcoin, Satoshi banner which read “BITCOIN” on it. Outside of blitzkriegs and watches there isn’t a
Nakamoto, was bivouacked in a tech commune in way to employ a man who looks like Rudy. So, he’s
San Francisco by the name of 20Mission. It seemed Anticipating such resistance, I produced the holster forced to hang around motorcycle shops, polishing
that Satoshi had come down off Mount Gox to be for a little revolver I carry when I’m feeling insecure. chrome until babes show up. Once the babes are in
among his people. I reasoned that I could get a leg up with an honest tow, Rudy goes into raconteur mode, cadges drinks,
leather merchant through trade. Also, the hard use cigarettes and screams until the sun rises or the
My job was to find him. No small task, as no one has on the holster would be evidence that I was a cops come. Happens every time. I never thought I’d
ever seen Mr. Nakamoto. pirate, too. be happy to see him again.

Here’s what we know about Satoshi Nakamoto: He Onder took the relic from me. I recited my creden- Rudy wiped the whiskey off his chiseled chin with
sleeps between 05:00 and 11:00. He does British tials, again. the back of his hand.
stuff, such as describe things as “bloody hard” and
spell “favor” with a “u”. He’s smarter than all the “Fuck, I know about that shit? But this,” he waved “Onder, you know my boy from LA?” Rudy passed
other geniuses. Everything else known about the the holster at me, “this cost for you: 70 bucks.” the bottle to Onder.
man is conjecture.
I gave him $50. Onder looked the money over good Onder drank while Rudy and I traded biker gossip
My contact at the tech commune was known as before putting it in his front pocket. about the dead and jailed. After a half hour the
“Onder.” I was shown a picture of a man with his hair brown liquor succeeded in washing the enmity from
slicked back, salt and pepper beard. Bar fight eye- “Take me two days,” he said. Then he shooed me Onder’s eyes. He beat me on the back and apolo-
brows. Long teeth to open bottles of grog; a pirate, toward the door. Interview over. I waved a bottle of gized for “acting tough guy” in clear pidgin English.
straight from central casting. Yo ho ho. No problem. whiskey at him. “Yo ho ho?” He licked his lips but
I’ll bring a bottle of rum. shook his head. It was the last move I had. I was Onder held up his phone and pressed a button. The
fucked. Should have brought the rum. door buzzed and he led me into the 20 Mission. I
When I arrived at Onder’s leather crafting shop in was in.
San Francisco, Skin On Skin, he had yet to be noti- It was then that fate walked into the shop in the
fied of his role in helping me track down Satoshi. He form of a man named Rudy. You’ve seen Rudy The stairs to the living quarters above were lined
stared through me with a vast, black, orthodox an- before because they use his face to sell expensive with the daily detritus of 40 people: empty cat cage,
ger burning in his eyes, as I faltered through names I Swiss timepieces. His leathered emaciation and cold mail stacks, barrels of weightlifting powder. The
hardly knew, writing for a magazine that didn’t blue eyes suggest a starving Panzer Captain attain- Welcome Wall at the top of the stairs had pictures
yet exist. ing beatification as he does the last of the meth with of everyone who is currently staying at 20Mission.
Russian winter closing in. Onder slapped the white board.
“You say, Meeeesy? Meeeesy sent you to me?” he
shrugged. Onder’s face, dress and broken English Too late, I hid the whiskey. “Look. These are people. Here living. Here is names.
indicated he had no time for journalists or any other Whachoowan?”
job-having cunts. Furthermore, I didn’t expect “Let me have some of that cowboy juice,” Rudy
a Turk. demanded as he took the bottle and drank from it. I scanned the 40 faces up on the wall. Prejudice
suggests Satoshi is Asian. Or Jewish. Practicality
“Who is Beetcoyunz?” he asks, leaning against *** dictates that he’s got an iron butt and terrible pos-
an ATM machine in his shop with a bright orange ture from sitting a million hours writing 31,000 lines

of Blockchain code. a timestamp. The record of transaction is verified Steve is working the stoves and doesn’t have
by every other Bitcoin in a public verification known enough time to vet me fully. His meatballs are being
“Which one is Satoshi?” as the Blockchain. This transparency could make over run, parmesan picked at. So, Steve introduces
it a dream currency for investigators following The me to the welcoming committee across the hall, a
Onder laughed and punched me in my solar plexus. Money. man I will call “Adonis,” and returns to the kitchen.
“Ha ha fuck to you!”
Steve marched me down the hall to an industri- “Hey! Wassyahguts! Just don’t throw us under the
I scanned the candidates as I regained my breath. al-grade kitchen where teams of people fried bus is all I axe of you,” demanded Steve from across
chicken and plated food. Nobody smelled the alco- the hall.
Which face could invent a code so complicated hol on my breath, because the schedule posted in
it has yet to be hacked by the worst of the web? the kitchen read “DAY DRINKING.” I opened a beer Adonis twists his moustache as he tinkers with
Which was capable of minting a puzzle into some- to toast my good luck. graphs, which parsed the beats of some horrible
thing that was, for a while, more valuable than gold? music and bubbles about how 20Mission is a really
Who put the “new” back in numismatics? I met the den mother of 20Mission, Diana, who inspiring place to live and work. Adonis can’t stop
claims to have lived there the longest, all of three working because he will get money if he can do it.
Onder and Rudy handed me over to the house man- years. She was there back when they had to throw If not - no. It’s that simple. Can he figure how many
ager named Steve. Steve is not short, not tall, but out the junkies and exorcise the hooker ghost. beats per minute are polluting our aural scape?
square. His nose has been pushed around his face, Diana was there because the founder of 20Mission Adonis doesn’t know. He’s trying. It’s certainly moti-
and a 10-gallon head shaved bald for maximum knew one thing from his time in the Marines: it is vational that he can see coders who didn’t make the
head butt. Claims he is from North Carolina with a important to have women around. rent from his window, patrolling the mission district
thick Brooklyn accent. for cigarette butts and crapping between
*** parked cars.
“Watch out for Heideiggah,” pointing out a cat
lounging in the sunspot. Adonis hunches over his keyboard, interactive
table flashing at the sound of his voice as he gives
Onder and Rudy left me with Steve without so much the history of the place. 20Mission used to be a
as a fare thee well as it was inevitable that I’d see shooting gallery, littered with needles and stolen
them later in the bars, in the halls and finally on the wallets. It was called “Hotel Hell” or “Terror Hotel.”
floor of this place. You could rent a room without a door for 300 bucks,
or 500 for a room with a door. Back then it was
Steve lets me know he’s busy, cooking Italian more Black Flag - all day video game binges and
food for 40 people, and runs through his bona fomenting sedition through the invention of a new
fides without prompting as we walk down the hall. type of currency.
Steve met the founder of 20Mission, a man named
Jared, in Afghanistan, where they were employed That was years ago, however. “20Mission has
as electrical contractors for Kellogg, Brown and evolved from a place with one shower, a gas jet
Root. My eyebrows go up. KBR is a subsidiary of the heater and flowered into the tech paradise of
famous war profiteering operation formerly known now” Adonis says, waving his hand, in a distracted
as Halliburton. manner, at the world outside of his door. Adonis had
done this boilerplate routine for other journalists.
54
We smoke apple flavored smoke from a vape hoo-
“Yeah. KBR. Keep bringing retahds.” kah. A Frenchman and two updated hippy chicks
come out of their rooms to look at the new writer
After Afghanistan, Jared brought Steve to manage guy. One of them had an Ophelia vibe. The other
20Mission. Steve has been focused on bringing the knotted white leather around a piece of shell she
old squat up to code, installing fire alarms and deal- picked up in Thailand. They were the new kids in
ing with the city inspectors. Steve is a sheep dog, the commune, still eager to hear the elders harkens
guarding the electric sheep. Good choice, Jared. All back to the Old Days of 2012.
the best clubs are run by bouncers.
Taking notes with a pen was an insult to them and
“Where were you stationed?” Steve averts his eyes, they couldn’t stop themselves from blurting out,
wary of journalist trash. But I’d come with solid “There’s an app for that!” every time I wrote some-
commendations from two known public enemies. thing analogue.
How could I be denied?
The doorbell rings. There’s an app for that.
“I can’t really say where I was stationed. I guess it
don’t matter now. You know. Sandbox. They check their phones. Hit a button. Someone
PB 2 and 1. Afghanistan. ” clunks up the stairs. It’s Steph the geek.

“Oh and where is Jared now?” Is Satoshi a woman? This has never even been
postulated, so, it’s something he would definitely
“He’s down in Medellin setting up the other do. Of course - that sneaky fucker is so smart, he’s
co-working site.” a woman!

Medellin. Afghanistan. KBR. A triangle of Steph is opening a tech school for coding and wants
interesting names. to create a social network for independent porn
producers. Why shouldn’t every lady have her own
Could Bitcoin be a black operation sponsored by porn channel if she wanted it? I thought of some
the government? Some say that the initial idea for reasons, but kept them to myself as she led me to
Bitcoin comes from open source paper originally her boudoir. She opened the door to reveal that it
penned by a government agency, in the same way was festooned with bustiers.
the Internet was developed as a system of com-
munication for defense industry computers before “This is where I do the cam girl thing,” she/he says,
it became a porn delivery platform. In fact, despite and points out a camera rig mounted under the top
being hyped as an undetectable underground bunk of an Ikea bunk bed. Nope. She’s no Satoshi.
currency, Bitcoin might prove to be a terrible way to If coding Blockchain is anything like writing for
move money for criminal enterprise. a magazine, Satoshi would have to put the bed
closer to the floor. I knew from long experience that
Every Bitcoin comes with a history of each transac-
tion the coin has ever been involved in, along with

KILL. FUCK. PLAY.

climbing up a ladder after a couple days of Adderal We drank to her success, and then our success. And It doesn’t really matter, anymore. The gold standard
and whiskey is a great way to break your neck. I bid how. Talk got loose. The last of the sunlight gilded was abandoned long ago. Today the value of the
the temptress adieu. the incoming fog as it blotted the ramparts of American Dollar is quantified by the primacy of our
the Presidio. Tyler is one of the geniuses who Seventh Naval Fleet, now parked around the Persian
In the hall a large man called Tyler rolls up at me like bought Bitcoin off the top. So, when the price went Gulf, in range of thousands of hostile missiles.
a big hairy boulder, and herds me up a staircase to from $20 up to $1000, he ended up paying about Tyler was right to be worried about Satoshi’s safety.
the roof. Tyler produces a web show called “Money a $100 for a year’s rent. Tyler was smart enough to Even bank executives must be aware of how quickly

and Tech,” which analyzes the ups and downs of know that people like me don’t travel to places like geeks killed taxis, landlines, the music industry,
the roller coaster ride that is Bitcoin value. As we
clunked up the stairs he briefed me on the newest 20Mission without there being a reason to be here. romance and proper journalism. But those things
Bitcoin news: The Winklevosses - the infamous, Ivy
League twins who commissioned Facebook - are were child’s play compared to messing with The
in town trying to regulate the Bitcoin market. For
what? Tyler didn’t know, but opined that if they Tyler fed me drinks. The fog obscured Sausalito. The Man’s money. That’s the type of sedition that gets
could stabilize the market it could be used to laun-
der that big, crooked, Ivy League money. other journalists had already covered the guy with you nailed to a cross. Don’t forget, San Francisco is

From the roof of 20Mission, Tyler pointed out the the Hug-O-Meter. What was left to know? a gold town, in the Golden State, built by 49ers and 55
buildings where the “Burrito”, the “Fortune Cookie”
and the “Twinkie Defense” were invented. The framed by a Golden Gate Bridge. It speaks to Mister
ladies struck yoga poses among the remains of a
chicken coop. Tyler says that the city demanded The Golden Gate Bridge floated in the sky, un- Nakamoto’s ambition to found his temple, here,
they demolish the chicken coop, because “the city
is a jerk.” moored. I admitted I had come to find Satoshi. upon the rubble of the old, golden gods. The lens

This is true. In the place of a Statue of Liberty, San Tyler focused visibly and said, “I can’t tell you who of fog crept over from the Haight, and reduced the
Francisco instead erected Alcatraz. The prison is set
center stage to remind the poor, the tired and the he is because as soon as his name is known he will landmark bridge to vague lines in the mist, which
starving that San Francisco don’t really want any of
that. We got plenty, thank you. be killed.” suggested the spars of a tall ship. Or a gibbet. The

More drinks. Something minty and strong. I was roof crowd clammed up. Night was upon us. So, we
introduced to a trim ginger with some smart guy
glasses on. Is this the guy? Maybe. I had given up on trooped down the stairs to the
Satoshi being Japanese.
kitchen where Steve’s feast was
“So what’s your app do?”
That’s the type of sedition that served.
“Allows you to watch stuff with someone in Everyone enjoyed platters of
another location.” gets you nailed to a cross. home-cooked Italian food until
Rudy loudly suggested that he
“Like football?”
would have sex with anyone at
“Porn. At first. Later, it will be for like a supervisor
and his little buddy at work or whatever.” Is Satoshi the table for “Just One Bitcoin!”
gay? It doesn’t say a thing about that in his white
paper. Bitcoin is an attempt to make the banks moot. As if No one even checked their phone to see how much

As the sun goes down Steph the Geek announces to dispel any doubt of this intention Mr. Nakamoto they were worth at that time.
that she has achieved new funding for her site. She
waves a glass of wine around “and here’s to the programmed a reference to the current banking
success of everyone here!”
system failure into the “Genesis” Bitcoin: “The Times After dinner, Onder and Rudy slunk away, which

03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout allowed the geek party to get down to some serious

for banks.” networking. I spoke to a Chilean working on an app

that would allow the user to see a “party” before

If everything goes according to Satoshi’s plan and he or she paid money to enter. Then a starry-eyed

Bitcoin remains unhacked until 2140, the banks Hug-O-Meter guy starts fishing for hugs from

will have to beg Satoshi to tell him how he did it. Ophelia, the girl with bunny ears that perked up and

Bitcoin’s proof that it is the best in cryptography is down with her mood. A huge guy from Copenhagen,

proven by the fact that, despite the worst intentions who acts as a tech Bounty hunter, spends his days

of every hacker in the world, Bitcoin still exists. It hacking companies for fun and profit.

has legitimacy in the business press and trades.

Also, in placing a premium on security, it appears It’s a veritable madhouse of original Netflix series

that Bitcoin has employed a longer-term strategy ideas: There was also, not surprisingly, a Bob Marley

than the Fed can even fathom. coder guy; an Israeli and an Asian guy with an

Australian accent; a funny Midwestern girl, and a

What good are the banks anyway? How much guy with a machine that printed Bitcoin receipts;

longer will we pay for huge buildings full of fat-cat Den mother Diana and a cheerleader whose car

paper pushers and their security guards? The real battery had been stolen; a Justin Bieber look alike,

question is this: “Has Man evolved to a point where in a Morrissey shirt, fixated on getting frat boys for

he can value the ability to solve a puzzle on a clock being frat boys.

more than shiny, shiny rocks?”

56

Then, I met a man who looks like the mask used “We can get past a system where psychopaths I felt it was a good idea to buy a Bitcoin. For the sto-
by Anonymous. Mister Anonymous from Spain was are the only people who are able to elevate. Some ry. I gave the machine the day’s market value of two
a true believer in Bitcoin and saw it as a way to people want to make the world a better place.” hundred ninety some odd dollars. The machine got
get rid of “banksters” in general; more specifically, a scan of my hand for identification. Welcome to the
he wants to get rid of the banks charging fees for “Who puts the cash in this thing?” I asked Mr. Anon- machine. The scan took forever and all I got for my
transferring his money from Spain to more stable ymous. Instead of answering he put a finger to his trouble was a piece of paper with some Rorschach
banks in the US. This is something he’s doing with lips, “Shhh. Shut up your mouth”. dots on it and freedom from the oppression of the
Bitcoin. It involves the use of local Bitcoin markets banking system.
where Mister Anonymous meets a local buyer ***
online, agrees to meet at a public location and After the Bitcoin receipt was printed, Mister Anon-
exchange cash for Bitcoin, like a drug deal. ymous and I repaired to the kitchen to get drunker
than we already were with the others. We spent the
But he tells me “now we have the machine here, so, most of the evening playing a game. Evidently, the
it’s not so, how you say, sketchy?” Mister Anony- rules of the game were to drink every time the value
mous offers to show me how it works. of Bitcoin fluctuated until we blacked out.
We go down to the Bitcoin machine in Onder’s shop.
Mr. Anonymous puts a code in the machine. “This The notes from the night are heavy with arcane data
money I bring from Spain where the economy is, about the Breton Woods Treaty, and future words
how you say, shit?” The machine whirs and dispens- like “gigaflops” and “teraflops,” numbers so big that
es a stack of hundred dollar bills. “I don’t want to they have yet to enter the common lexicon.
give no more of my money to the banks. Your money
is, like, a vote.” The occupants of 20Mission were unaware of the
science-minded faction of the place. They didn’t
The machine keeps whirring, more money as Mr. need William Gibson telling them to take math
Anonymous arranged his cash in various pockets. meth and invent the new money to overthrow the

KILL. FUCK. PLAY.

57

Nation-state. And this is how humanity progresses: “Satoshi?” worked out a deal with the pit bull at the door for a
Like-minded people living together in close quarters room where the writer might crash in the unlikely
allows the unconscious to collect. Members of such He shakes me off - no he is not Satoshi. His name event that he is voluntarily overserved.
groups can become a conduit for the desires of a is actually Hugo. The halls were thick with firework
generation. (The V2 rocket program, the Manhattan smoke. I beat the fire alarm into the drywall with a My joy dissipated when I realized the door numbers
Project, The Left Bank are all examples of places broom until it stopped the infernal had no order. Maybe it was a puzzle code or what
where people lived together to achieve screeching. the fuck? I found Onder and Rudy in front of a
the Next Thing.) computer with a young lady named Breeze and
Hugo watched me pour beer over a fresh firework yet another Motorhead guy watching the wart on
History proves again and again that the fastest way burn before asking if I had heard of Hunter S. Lemmy’s face getting bigger. (“The Ace of Spades,
to get to the next level is you got to get down with Thompson. Comparisons are odious. I ask him if he’s The Ace of Spades!”) Where did these people come
the other freaks. Talk to them. Love them, hate ever heard of Bob Marley. He laughs and holds up a from? I hadn’t heard the door app buzzer go off for
them, figure out what they want. You got to smell picture of Bob Marley on his lighter to light a joint. hours.
their crap and throw fireworks at them in the hall, The profile on the lighter, a cameo of Bob Marley
which is what we ended up doing. Or, what I ended with a joint in his mouth, was identical to his. Onder ran at me and grabbed me by the collar. “You
up doing. Or that’s what some guy with dreadlocks must respect for firework hour!”
was yelling at me to stop doing. “Yah mon. I get it. We even,” he says.
I tried to explain about how the numbers were
“No fireworks after midnight!” Hugo is not the man I’m looking for. Breaking even wrong on the doors as he and Rudy dragged me
in a battle of wits with a minor hack would not hap- down the hall. Rudy fleeced me of my weed as they
I told him about how it’s strategy, using loud noises pen to the man who created the Blockchain. threw me into a room with an upside down number
to flush the Bitcoin guy out from his cover. A leader “3” painted on it.
of his caliber would have to come forward when his Hatred from the inhabitants of 20Mission roiled over
dojo was attacked. me like squid ink. It was time to find my door to hide
behind. In a rare flash of foresight, the magazine

The flat light of dawn dissipated in the nearest Breakfast chat was very technical. A thin, wild Both require lots of time alone - too much. The
writer who spends his time socializing gets nothing
fogbank in the Bay. Nice, until it burned off, and the haired guy named Chris pitched the new thing he done, but if he spends too much time by himself he’ll
just drink, masturbate, cry, and repeat. In a co-
sun showed its blistering glow. I stumbled out to the was working on “Bitcoin mining for your mom.” It working environment, a coder can shut the door
and get weird as he or she wants. Open the door,
bathroom. And there they were - the lot of them. was then that I saw the Bounty Hunter make a deal and five geeks and a cheerleader will ask how their
app is coming along.
The walk of shame is shorter and more concise to see if he could hack the system set up by Chris. It
I stepped out to sample the local nightlife at a near-
in a commune. was akin to a leopard making a deal with a gazelle by bar called “Benders” where a pitcher of Anchor
Steam was $12. The place was full of clean, nervous
around the watering hole. nerds trying to drink enough to get over a Tinder
date. It occurred to me that when these couples
Steve was making breakfast and listening to “Mar- consummated their relationships their children (God
forbid) would be the by- product of an App. If a child
garitaville” without any sense of irony as Onder fried I followed Chris back to the common room where he is engendered by Tinder how could she not believe
in the intrinsic worth of the Internet? It’s the Alpha
breakfast in his underwear. Ophelia and the jewelry explained how underlying gestalt of the Nakamoto and the Omega. This child will want Bitcoin because
it’s made of the very stuff from whence she came.
twister ignored me. The mood was different now. consensus and the Blockchain creates trust among No coins to lose. No god to trust. No banks to fail.
Just filthy lucre. Finally, we can render the gold back
humans. Trade is what civilized us, what made us to Caesar. Algorithms knit us together nowadays.
It’s Evolution. No man is an Alcatraz.
They had seen my handwriting get worse as the men. The Blockchain makes trade into trust.
***
night wore on, and they knew they had nothing to

fear. My “getting drunk” routine, and my inability to “How many people do you trust right now?” wisely,

use apps convinced them that I was, at best, only Chris didn’t wait for an answer. “What if I told you,

capable of writing another puff piece about how that, with this box,” and he pointed to a black box

20Mission is “The All Stars of Asbergers.” with a button that read “remember/forget” and “I

can trust millions of people and they are trusting

*** me. The number of people and machines involved

will only go higher. Think about it, if trade marks the

beginning of civilization, isn’t enabling faster trade a

type of evolution?”



As we spoke every transaction occurring in the

Blockchain scrolled by on the screen in sums, enor-

mous and sundry.



“The Blockchain is the amazing thing at work here,”

says Chris. “The intended consequence of Block-

chain is that it will create a system for a mega com-

puter. Every new computer in the chain can be used

as part of a super computer. After 2140 this block

chain will get a chance to teach us how to solve the

great problems facing mankind, like curing cancer

or figuring out where to put the Palestinians.”



As he said this three equal amounts of $999,000

caught my eye.

58

“Sure, but WHO’s sending that amount of money?

And for what?”



“Well it doesn’t really matter it is simply a means

of transference. If you are insinuating that this is

an illicit transaction then the perpetrators will use

American hundred dollar bills, Francs, Baht, Dong,

whatever. Crime takes all roads. Who cares if it’s in

Bitcoin or what?”



Articulate, libertarian, no time for hair care. Every-

thing about Chris was screaming that this was

my man.



“In addition,” he

says, “Bitcoin

happens to be

If the Winklevosses could stabilize the market it emerging at the
could be used to launder that big, crooked, same time as China
Ivy League money. is awakening from
its slumber. The
currencies are des-
tined to develop
together.”

He leaned back in his chair and it gave a loud creak.
The chair was some rust job from the 1950s. Nope.
Satoshi would have to Herman Miller chair with the
lumbar thing, the adjustable arms - the works. No
man could write 31,000 lines of impenetrable code
with swamp ass.

I bade him farewell, and treaded the halls, peeking in
at various geeks. Some of the doors were layered in
graffiti, emblematic of how long each freak had lived
there. The benefit of coders living in a co-working
community is evident to me. Coding is, essentially,
the same job as writing for magazines or
“web sites.”

KILL. FUCK. PLAY.

I came back to 20Mission way too late. Evidently, I followed him down. The wall of the offices below shoots the rats, scares the junkie bums off, and
quiet time had been cancelled because Onder and were festooned with whiteboards garbled over enables 20Mission to become a tech bohemia so
his miscreants were listening to Motorhead at peak with mathematical equations. I never knew leather that geeks - and the women who love them - can
volume. Onder grabbed me by my face and forced work was so complicated. I opened the door and co-work mankind to the next level.
me to drink the black liquor used in gypsy brothels. came down a set of rickety stairs in the back of the
leather shop. He’s the reason that nerds are allowed to ride long
“Why are you steel heeere, man?” skateboards with backpacks full of technology
There on the floor was a set of identical twins with without getting mugged in the Mission District of
Little did Onder know that I have learned to drink too many teeth, and muscles. The twin with the San Francisco. The Tenderloin, too.
the black liquor. The trick is to bite through your bigger head held what appeared to be a severed
tongue in order to retain consciousness. In a twilight hand on the scanner of the Bitcoin machine as the And, thanks to him, the Blockchain will super-
of pain I was able to snatch bits of conversation. other twin jammed stacks of money into the cash sede the nodes of the web to create an Internet
Onder flexed his fist into one of his signature cre- slot. They froze. I had caught them, dead hand- where your information is no longer monitored by
ations, a set of leather knuckles and stood over me ed. Facebook, Google or NSA types. He is the reason
on the couch. computers grind away at crypto puzzles in the
“Um. Hey. Just looking for my holster. ” snowy wastes of Norway.
“You know we have things to do!”
“I thought you said we’d be alone!” the smaller one Make no mistake: the entirety of the crypto rebellion
Girls laughed. Someone dragged me down the hall brayed at Onder. has always rested upon his shoulders. So, don’t
to smoke something I’ve never heard of. What’s it bother him, unless you have legitimate leather con-
called? More laughter. Onder grabbed me by my shirt and shook me until cerns. Onder is a very busy man. Be careful when
my teeth rattled as he screamed in a plummy British approaching him. Bring a gift. Don’t ask too many
I was in a new room. Blue velvet and black carpet. accent, “Okay, you found me! I’m the Dread Pirate questions. Because, after all, he only knows three or
Black lights. I stumbled over a hydra headed whip- Roberts and Satoshi whoseewhatsit too! I’ve been four sentences to cover the topics he will talk about,
pet machine. called several bloody names over the years.” before he sends you on your way.

“Wanna whippet?” The twins advanced, snorkle chins jutted danger- 59
ously close to my face.
Dub Step crunched out from a stereo hidden under
a pile of dirty clothes. This “music” is the new “Come with me, David! We will overthrow the banks!
patchouli, ubiquitous, cloying and woven into the The gods! The monsters!”
very fabric of San Francisco. We smoked. I don’t
know what it was, but the effect was sudden clarity. I looked at the twins. The smaller headed one tried
My setting came into sharp focus. The ginger guy to hide the shriveled hand.
was there, and a muscular Asian guy, too, bouncing
around, feet sticking to the carpet, “I love house “We didn’t do the hand.”
music.”
It was then that I snapped to something Tyler said
The room smelled like bong water. Men’s under- earlier.
wear. Grape KY jelly. Nasty. Where am I? I search
through my notes: ginger app - watch porn with “Wait a minute, Onder are these people the Winkle-
other person. I tried to piece it together. House vosses?”
music, whippets. Didn’t seem like something Satoshi
would have the time for. The big -headed twin made a cutting gesture across
his neck and I was struck by something hard, but
“I love house music,” the Asian man said, soft, like a set of leather brass knuckles.
once again.
There was a bright light and then, all was quiet.
The ginger strapped a dildo on his head and then Faintly, I heard Rudy claim he knew just what to do
tossed it in a suitcase, “I’m going to South By,” he with me.
said by way of explanation.
I awoke in the ginger’s sex palace, hose from the
It was then I remembered the other thing that made whippet machine still in my hand. The room empty.
San Francisco famous: That late night indulgence Fuck. The buzz of blacklight was the only sound that
that all real men crave when the fog rolls in, and no kept me going. I peeled myself from the carpet, and
one can see you. You know what I’m talking about - skated around, there were spent nitrous cartridg-
Tommy’s pastrami at the Original Tommy’s Joint on es. As I picked a melted Twix bar out of my hair, I
Geary. So tender. So juicy. Cash only. Gotta GO. realized it was a good night.

“Bye Felicia.” Again, I pushed the velvet curtains away to find the
door. Was there some way out of here?
I fought my way through the curtains until I found
the door and stumbled into the hall. Onder’s I ran down halls, beat on doors, like a mad man. No
picture on the Welcome Wall has the words “these one answered. No one in the kitchen, even Adonis
motherfuckers” falling out of his mouth in a cartoon was gone from his labors.
balloon. I remembered that Onder had my holster
and where was that freak anyway? Finally, I noticed a new leather holster duct taped
to the Welcome Wall. The words “GET OUT” were
The hall was quiet outside of his room. Evidently, scrawled across the faces of my fellow
the Motorhead app had stopped functioning. I commune mates.
tripped over Tesla the cat - this is how I ended up
looking under Onder’s door. I saw Onder rock his And I did, finally: I got out of there. Geeks are the
Motorhead Altar on a hinge so he could descend kind of people who will call a SWAT team on you
into the floor of his room. I thought this was funny, for fun.
like a mime show, so I opened the door and called
his name. Then I peered down into the trap door Should you see Onders, stitching leather at the
and realized that Onder really had descended on a corner of 20 and Mission Street, listening to Slayer
ladder built into the floor. in the hot dog wind, know that he is The One who













SHOT BY ANDREW KUYKENDALL

MODELS:
Hannah Glasby
Kayslee
Lauren Young
Myf

KILL. FUCK. PLAY.



Written by: Ward Robinson
Photos by: Elliot Gold

T he Chosen Few is a motorcycle club I know the story but tell me how you met the illegal acts in front of me. Three, if I learned of some-
founded in 1959 in the Watts area of Los Chosen Few. thing illegal, or witnessed it, I would have to turn
Angeles. From the beginning, founder Lionel them in. So they agreed and I agreed and I began
Ricks wanted The Chosen Few to be about brother- During the late 60s and early 70s, I was a photojour- following them and going and photographing them. I
hood, togetherness, and above all riding motorcy- nalist working with law enforcement. I was covering did that from around 1971 till 1973.
cles. In the early 60s, pre-civil rights legislation US, community meetings that the sheriff’s department
having an integrated club of any kind was rare but in this area held every few months to get the com- Were you photographing them everyday? It sounded
biker culture in particular was and still is notoriously munity to talk about what their concerns were. The like you became part of the family in a certain way.
racist so having an integrated motorcycle club was meetings were boring and people didn’t show up. You got a nickname and everything. What was that
sort of insane. However, within a couple of years time like, in pragmatic terms?
the all black club had accepted white members into We were at a meeting in this school - a gigantic
their ranks. auditorium - and we heard a rumble. We turned Two to three days a week in the evenings I would
and realized that the whole Pasadena chapter of go by the Pasadena clubhouse. Take pictures. In the
As the club grew in size in the late 60s and the Chosen Few was riding into the gymnasium. It beginning, they would kind of turn their head, “Oh,
early 70s, chapters started in Pasadena, the San ended up there were more of them than citizens. It the camera man is here. He is going to figure out I’m
Fernando Valley, Hollywood, and the San Gabriel was pretty surprising. not with my wife, that I am armed, and doing drugs.”
Valley, and the cultural variety within the club also After visiting them for several weeks, they couldn’t
expanded to include Latino, Asian, and American The sheriff’s deputies in the front started to draw even see me. I was completely transparent. I could
Indian members. The members of the Chosen Few their guns, but Lieutenant Elmore, said, “They’re come in and photograph anything and nobody
in that era were not afraid to ride anywhere as an with me. This is the Pasadena chapter of the would say a fucking word. Nothing. They’d let me
integrated group, though it was common for them Chosen Few Motorcycle Club. They have come watch all the time and they just started calling me
to be turned away from bars and restaurants and to talk with us.” I was shocked he knew them but Cameraman. I began in the winter and then in the
physically confronted by citizens as well as more Lieutenant Sonny Elmore was a friend of mine and spring, when they did their runs, I went on those.
well-known and much larger white bike clubs. They he was a biker. Later I told him I was interested in The first one I went on was the Salton Sea. It proba-
made a name for themselves by never backing photographing them and he said he could set it up. bly would have been ’71 or ’72.
down, and were totally committed to riding their
bikes and partying as hard as possible. They How did the process begin? What was the experience like? Hanging out with
developed a slogan “Take No Shit Give No Shit” to these outlaw bikers every day?
describe their stance. We had a meeting at the LA chapter with about 100
members who were all going to vote on the idea I What I quickly learned was that brotherhood was
Early in the club’s history, photographer and was presenting. I said to them, “I’d like to do a book more important than drugs, alcohol, running trains
reporter Elliot Gold spent three years developing an on the Chosen Few. It would basically be a photo on broads, which they did, and all sorts of things
intimate relationship with the Chosen Few and was essay and I’d share the revenue with you.” Also, if that we, or outsiders, think the preference is of bik-
allowed to photograph them from a very privileged I were to do the book, there would be a few rules: ers. Sure they do all that stuff... but they’re brothers.
perspective. The results are spectacular. We talked One, they were not going to harm me or threaten
with him about his experiences 40-plus years ago. me in any way. Two, they were not to commit any Tell me more about that because it sounds like every

biker club would say the same thing. Were they pissed off? Did you try to take pictures of the new members only
to be rebuffed?
Yes, they would. I’ve found that most clubs are Uh, no. Because I had done exhibits, one of which
brotherhoods. The Chosen Few is no different. But was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. They had I did go to the new, not the runs, but I would go
the difference here was that they saw no color, saw seen the photographs. They had the photographs to the picnics and so forth, and I would go to the
no ethnicity, and saw nothing about age. and the photos had been in magazines and newspa- club meetings. But when I presented the book as it
pers, so, nah. They weren’t pissed off. was done, I found that the new administration, the
Why did Lionel want to do that? Include other races. younger people just didn’t get it. The older guys did
35 years after I stopped, I returned to the project but the new young people didn’t get it. They were
He wanted to ride with other people who liked bikes knowing how to write. There is a complete misper- offended. “That’s not who we are.”
and who were brothers. That was the only rule. It ception of who bikers are and I decided I wanted
was his only criteria. to dispel that. I had learned that I could trust bikers Is that who they are though?
more than many of my friends.
So, even though he started off with a couple of other I don’t really know because I was kind of disinvited.
black friends, it didn’t start off specifically as, “We’re So I got a hold of a lot of the people that I had I went back and interviewed people I hadn’t inter-
going to make a black club”? interviewed and I went back and interviewed them viewed before but I didn’t go to the younger people
again. Many of the people I went back to see, other to be honest with you. I just got the feeling that
No, no. There were black clubs already but he didn’t than those who had passed away unfortunately, had when I went there that the new younger bikers were
like them. He wanted it to be about inclusion and evolved, had businesses, had all sorts of things and just some different breed and I had already done my
family. They had picnics and runs where people were dedicated to their families. documentation of this fraternity that aged.
would bring their wives and children.
When you were going back and doing the pick up Those guys, man, the guys—the style that the guys
Also it turns out that they come from all walks of life interviews for the book, did you just work with the had in the early ’70s in your photos just, it melts my
and they come from basically all levels of the econo- people you already knew or did you start talking to brain. It’s so good.
my, from drug dealers all the way up to PhDs. Who new guys, too?
were the people that I began to learn that I needed Yeah. Well, you know that Clifford, Cliff Vaughn, was
to watch my ass for? The weekend bikers. I found New guys too, but the new Chosen Few is not the a Chosen Few and he was the one who did the bikes
that the ones that I could absolutely trust were the old Chosen Few. for Easy Rider. He was the guy who bridged the
ones that most people would think of as thugs. credibility gap. He was working for a news station
What’s the difference? when Peter Fonda got busted for marijuana. They
Why was it harder to trust the weekend guys? wanted to do a story on Peter so he went out and
To be fair, I’m not spending a lot of time with the interviewed him and he brought over Dennis Hopper
I think that the thugs weren’t trying to rise up new Chosen Few, okay? I’m working with the OGs. and said they were thinking about this film. So one
through the ranks and store money in the bank. Some of the old guys were still administering the thing leads to another and he built the bikes. The
They just want to have fun. They want to have a life. Chosen Few. In particular Doc was the national people who did the best bikes in my opinion were
president and he finally stepped down two years Cliff and the Kid. Just wonderful pieces of artwork.
But despite hanging out with thugs a lot I only ever ago. I don’t know if it’s just the way society evolves.
took pictures of one crime. I was in the darkroom You look at any fraternal organization. They just It sounds like you’re saying that the big thing that you
one night and I got a phone call. “Cameraman? change. The new administration doesn’t like the way learned is that you got an insight into the humanity
We’re going to [MAKES A CH-CH SOUND]. You I documented the Chosen Few. of these people who were outcast, outlaw, fringe of
gotta get here.” Turns out that Pat works right next society dwellers who were typically looked down
door to this guy who owns a gun shop, and it’s the They don’t like the pictures? upon and the closer you got to them, the more they
end of the month and he said, “Hey, Pat, if you want seemed like -
to bring your brothers down here tonight after I They don’t like my title, Bikes, Babes and Booze.
close, I’ll sell them any kind of guns they want, 40 The reason I chose that title is that my target audi- The kind of human beings I wanted to
percent off.” There’s a reasonable percentage of the ence was not bikers, but people who aspired to be associate with.
Chosen Few who have felony backgrounds. I have bikers, citizens who romanticized the idea of bikers.
photographs of those people buying guns illegally.

Why did you do that?

They gave me permission to come down there.

But that’s against your rules.

I know.

Why did you do that?

I don’t know. Maybe I had spent too much time with
them.

OK. So, did you have an idea what you wanted out of
the project?

Yeah. The intent was to do a book. It would be
based on photographs but it would have writing.
My photo work is really good, my writing sucked.
Okay. So I wrote three chapters and sent them off
to publishers but they didn’t like the writing so they
all passed. I had always wanted to do my graduate
work. So I left the Chosen Few. I couldn’t publish the
book and I just stopped cold turkey.





“What I quickly learned was that brotherhood was more important than
drugs, alcohol, running trains on broads, which they did, and all sorts
of things that we, or outsiders, think the preference is of bikers.”



















SURVIVAL RESEARCH

LABORATORIES

Written by: Isabelle Kohn

Photos and show posters courtesy of SRL



Mark Pauline has spent the last 37 a few more people, Mark created Survival Research like a Montessori Dad. A mass of cable and tubing
years making machines that remind Laboratories, the machine performance collective becomes the Hand-O-God, a great and terrible
you that you’re going to die. From his that’s been staging his disturbing productions since metal appendage whose wrath strikes with eight
Northern California laboratory, he 1979. tons of force. The wheels and 500 cubic inch engine
raises hulking, screeching monstrosities up from the “I build machines that have a lot of character,” Mark of a Ford El Dorado become the ultra-dangerous
dead and sends them not to the assembly line but says. Every time SRL does a show, he makes the ten Pitching Machine, capable of hurling six-foot long,
to the limelight. Mark doesn’t make practical robots. o’clock news. “People think I’m a maniac,” he says. two by four boards 120mph at a rate of two per
He decided very early on in his life that he never “I act on my animal instincts like any other criminal, second, fast enough to pierce walls hundreds of
wanted to make any machine that would make but I also act on my creative ones. That makes feet away. Airplane jets become a pillar of fire called
anything that would make anyone money or hurt me more legitimate.” At one show, called “A Fiery the Flame Hurricane, five LOUD 150 LB thrust
anyone. No construction. Instead he makes feral Presentation of a Dangerous and Disturbing Stunt Pulsejet engines and a system of 8 by 8 foot louvers
creations hellbent on destruction, multiton insults Persona”, he tested how far physical endangerment arranged in a 45 ft. circle to produce a rapidly
to logic predestined to become actors in a glorious could possibly go. Mark had his assistant, Matty rotating column of hot, high velocity hurricane like
apocalypse party. Operating under his nom de Heckert, drive a go-cart through an exploding wind. Gasoline is injected into this swirling vortex of
plume “Survival Research Laboratories,” Mark builds gasoline trough. “We used the audience not so hot air at a pressure of 1000 psi and a flow of 1.5
his robots to fight each other to the death in lurid, much as performers, but as targets threatened with gallons per second, producing a flaming layer on
sonically devastating acts of ultraviolent perfor- destruction! Yeah! Matty had this flamethrower he the exterior of the rotating air column. Powerful fuel
mance art. When you see an SRL show, you either kept on shooting toward the audience, and I had my vapor explosions are a distinct possibility.
see God or the insides of your eyelids. radio control car [a seven hundred pound life-size So what do we do? We go to see him, and by ‘we’ I
car that’s run by radio control with no driver], with mean myself and the 46-year old man who will be
Mark’s machines are a delivery method of fear and
if you’ve ever enjoyed Bosch, Gotterdammerung or a giant buzz saw attached to the front of it, go documenting the experience on celluloid.
Mad Max, the scale and ferocity of his performanc- berserk. I made it careen completely out of control, Perhaps we too will become targets threatened
es might resonate with you. SRL shows are like break through the Plexiglas protection barrier and with destruction, so we bring half a dozen fresh
whatever you think Hell is: fiery explosions licking at run out into the audience... knocking people over!” donuts just in case.
your face; the penny taste of horror; erratic, insane Machines are much more powerful and dangerous When you enter the 20,000 sq. ft. warehouse that
and painfully loud noises - all emanating from a than any human and when they interact violently, is Survival Research Laboratories’ home, you enter
small army of pilotless animatronic robots locked it creates an impression too deep to forget. Mark a shrine to potential. From every corner, piled high
in a ceaseless ultraviolent melee. It is sadism in has his own indelible impression from his machines. to the dusty rafters, are dead metals waiting to be
the WASP-y face of normalcy. Crowds in obvious In 1982, he was working with a rocket motor that reborn; several full hardware stores and an enor-
physiological distress stand behind barricades exploded in front of him, deleting all but his middle mous junkyard’s worth of parts, pieces, shapes and
looking one of two ways: terrified and praying that finger from his right hand. He was rushed to the scraps on one side of the building and a full array
the carnage will end before their eardrums implode hospital where his hand was repaired by taking a of high and low-tech forming and shaping tools
or calcified in maniacal catatonia, eyes wide and couple toes and some skin off his back to compile and machines. Amongst it all is Mark, whom we
teeth bared in a slick grim reaper smirk as though what he now calls his ‘gimp hand’. But as cute as a find fiddling with the Track Robot, an SRL machine
Jesus himself has swooped down and delivered a gimp hand may be, what’s most endearing about from the old days that was outfitted with some sort
message of war so close to their faces they could Mark is the sense of responsibility he feels to liber- of groundbreaking virtual reality setup two nights
smell his reeking thousand year-old breath. Audi- ate machines from banality. ago. It’s casual. He’s joined by his son, Jake Eddie,
ence members become involuntary participants. Everywhere he looks he sees mega-ton pieces of who would definitely be a finalist in the World’s
steel crushed under the weight of their own unused Most Endearing Spawn competition if such a thing
84 Glass is shattered. Metal is rent. There are smoking potential, bored by their routines. He digs deep into existed, mostly due to his capacity to pester Mark
the core of their personalities to discover what they to no end. Mark accepts our donut offering with his
craters. There are ruins. At one show in 1995, a really want to be, cultivating their idiosyncrasies gimp hand and doesn’t immediately try to kill us. So
full size remote-controlled car jousted around, far so good.
wielding a 15’ tall spinning cone of school desks,
legs pointing outward, a naked baby doll impaled
on the end of each sharpened desk foot. “It’s as if
several junkyards’ worth of our refuse had risen up
to let out an immense collective scream”, wrote the
Boston Globe’s Leighton Klein of the shows, over
50 thus far from San Francisco to Copenhagen to
Tokyo. “For someone looking for a good time, I don’t
recommend it.”

Why is any of this attractive? Because fear. Fear
is therapeutic. “Destruction is the ultimate power
of the universe. Being destructive is the closest a
human can get to being a god. Creation is a distant
second in that regard. My ultimate fantasy about
what people should take away from these shows is
that when someone who’s been to a show is on their
deathbed, the images from an SRL show are some
of the last things that are crossing the path of their
mind before they expire.”

And in the art world, Mark is not part of the art
world. What he does has no highbrow intention or
inspiration, it is meant to make you shit yourself for
his enjoyment. When I ask him whether he thinks his
work is art, he says, “I don’t need to think anything
about it. I just need to do it.” Here’s the thing about
Mark: it doesn’t matter if what he does is art or not,
because he’s the only non-government contractor
in the world who’s making machines on this scale.
Regarding the decades of 16-hour days designing
and assembling impractical machines, the battles
with local authorities over fire safety and the
constant grind for funds to produce his work, Mark
says it “seems like the only way.” Like any machine,
a man has in him a calculable number of productive
hours. So to spread his prodigious workload over to

KILL. FUCK. PLAY.



We get right into it. Like his robots, Mark is steely smashed holes in the concrete wall and we put the bother asking permission from eponymous Alex, or
and direct, almost forcefully so. “I do not see myself bleachers on the other side of these holes.” A good from anyone. A crowd of about 30 gathered as he
in any of these machines,” he says when I ask him if show needs a good name, SRL’s of the past have unloaded the De-Manufacturing Machine, the first
the personalities he brings out of them means they been titled “An Explosion of Ungovernable Rage”, ever SRL creation. He’d liberated its components
have a soul. “They’re strictly externalized phenom- “Ghostly Scenes of Infernal Desecration”, “Further from a brewery, suturing a conveyor belt to a high-
enon. I think what they are, is an extension of my Explorations in Lethal Experimentation” and “A speed fan topped with a Plexiglas bubble. Anything
attitude. They’re kind of like a stance, you know? Calculated Forecast of Ultimate Doom: Sickening conveyed into the spinning blades would be
Like posers. I pose them in the same way people Episodes of Widespread Devastation Accompanied de-manufactured to pieces, briefly whirling up and
pose dolls. Then, to be able to have a machine show by Sensations of Pleasurable Excitement”... you get around the transparent dome before falling back to
work the way you intend it to, you’ve got to have the idea. earth. The remnants collected on a platform below
a backdrop of some kind. It could be a fabricated before being ejected violently out of the machine.
backdrop; it could be a location that’s just amazing. The first SRL show, “Machine Sex,” opened Sunday, Tinny PA speakers played a slowed down, tape-dis-
February 25, 1979 at Alex’s Service Station in the torted version of The Cure’s “Killing an Arab” at an
86 We did a show in a giant toilet paper factory from North Beach district of San Francisco. Pauline didn’t uncomfortable volume.

the 30’s in Austria one time. Our machines just

KILL. FUCK. PLAY.

87

The De-Manufacturing Machine spun to life. One everyone else on the same playing field. weird, instinctive fear of snakes, so the idea was
by one, eight dead pigeons journeyed down the that I could have a character that has the precision
conveyor belt. Pauline had killed them himself, using Back at SRL, Mark fires up the Spine Robot. For the and coldness of a robot, but also inspires a kind of
his slingshot in an abandoned warehouse; he’d also uninitiated, the Spine Robot is a tree-sized metal instinctual fear response because it’s like a
dressed them in Arab doll costumes. It was 1979, snake attached to what I think is the liberated snake, too.”
and in the American imagination the traditional remains of a tractor but may also be a repurposed
white robes evoked the Shah of Iran, OPEC, and the elevator. Its head is a 400-pound, razor sharp claw What the Spine Robot lacks in industrial functional-
energy crisis. The octet of dead, costumed poultry which moves at 20 feet per second. Its neck is ity, it makes up for in extreme creepiness, unpredict-
proceeded into the blades, transmogrified into a 15 feet tall, reptilian and comprised of hundreds ability and impracticality. Each one of its qualities
pulp of flesh, blood, and cloth that the De-Man- of discs that act like immortal vertebra. Its heart helps create a personality and the personality is
ufacturing Machine then spat at the audience. is a fuel-injected 37 HP industrial motor. It’ll lift how people know it’s more than just a machine, it’s
After Machine Sex, he did a piece called “Assured up 28,000 pounds before it breaks. That’s what it a wake-up call from beyond. “There was a moment
Destructive Capability,” where he used a machine was made for, to lift and fling impossibly unwieldy during a recent show where he was using the Spine
called The Stabber to mutilate a teddy bear wearing objects that were never meant for flight. Robot to pluck dead coyotes from another machine.
a mask of Leonid Brezhnev. At some point, there ‘I was operating that for most of the show, and I
was a tree laden with cat corpses. From there, it And that’s what I’m up against as I stand just out grabbed a coyote and threw it toward the audience,’
only gets worse. of reach of its death grip. Mark turns it on. He he says. ‘I saw it land in a puddle and splash this
nudges some controls. It breaches the boundaries 13-year-old girl, splashed this muddy water all over
“I basically consider myself to be a comedian. These of animation as electricity pulses life force through her. And she just looked horrified at first, then she
are just gags. It’s like all a joke, ultimately. I mean, its nuts, pun totally intended. Mark presses a switch just started laughing.’ He imagines her thinking back
to me, I do it because I think it’s funny. I think it’s that makes the neck coil up like a python ready to to that muddy water and that dead coyote in front of
funny to do these shows and I always like to pretend eviscerate you. That function was premeditated, no her as she herself dies. The 13-year-old on the cusp
there’s a reason for it but really I do it because I doubt. Like all of Mark’s machines, the Spine Robot of adolescence, trying to figure out the world, and a
think it’s funny more than anything else.” So SRL is half theatrical, half pragmatic. As its vertebrae message as comically inscrutable as physics and an
is like a decades-long prank, one executed with swings its head around, twisting with the flexibil- airborne coyote, mummified and suddenly splashing
an unfathomable degree of meticulousness and ity of a building-sized serpent, I kind of feel like down at her feet, the work of some benevolent
precision... but a prank on whom? People take in I need to shit. At no time am I in this thing’s way, prankster-artist. What else could she do but laugh?”
Mark’s work in the same way they take in religious nor does Mark try to fuck with me from behind the - Leighton Klein, Boston Globe
sacrament or ayahuasca-soaked spirit realizations. controls, but even from the safety of where I stand,
Despite his urging of, “Please, don’t anybody look to something about it makes my adrenal glands squirt “You don’t want to waste the abilities of the ma-
SRL shows for guidance in the real world,” people hot emergency juice and my heart pounds with chines,” he says. “That’s the first order of business.
search for meaning in it. But SRL doesn’t hold the inefficient rapidity. There’s no denying it; Mark’s You want to make sure that you maximize their po-
same kind of answers as the rest of the art world. machines devolve you into a logic-defying brain- tential. You want to give them a job to do.” There is
Mark’s work is not subjective. It either changes stem screaming “FEARFEARFEAR”, stuck between well-documented catharsis in violence; you’ve seen
you or you’re just deaf. This shit will level you and fight-and-flight. “People have this sort of natural, it in every movie and classical painting and Army

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89

Reserve recruit wet dream. Where else do you find her that’s what he wanted to do, she offered a curt Mark Pauline is, and if they do, they can’t decide
acceptable outlets for your anti-social impulses? “Well, Mark, that’s illegal. I can’t do that.” This non whether what he does is art. “The art world was
The Juggalo Gathering? risk-taking disgusted him and, out of spite, he de- much more codified and conservative back then,”
cided he’d invent a whole new art style no one had says Jon Reiss, who shot video of SRL’s early shows.
A lot of people interpret his disinterest in audience ever done before. He’d use the art world when he “Mark was kind of anathema to them, whereas
opinion and hearing capability as a rebellion against could, but he’d never be beholden to them. “I’m not someone doing that kind of stuff now would be
the art world. “I don’t have a gripe with them, “ going to ever have to look back and deal with some much more readily embraced. I think SRL broke
he tells me. Then looks down sheepishly, pauses art curator going, ‘Oh, I discovered Mark Pauline. I’m a lot of ground in that regard. I don’t think Mark
and grins. “Okay. My gripe started when I was in the one that made him famous.’ I was just going to and the people who worked with SRL have gotten
college.” In college, Mark was heavily involved in the create attention, and go completely outside the art enough credit for that. Part of it is that Mark doesn’t
local punk scene. He had a professor whose wife world, unless I chose in my own way to be involved give a fuck and hasn’t for a long time.”
ran a gallery in Sarasota. When Mark graduat- with them.”
ed, she offered to host a show for him before he Mark has no training in the mechanics of machine
vacated the Floridian shithole. He wanted to deface One of the reasons he started SRL was to have a making. He’s been self-taught since he was 17. Liv-
and mutilate billboards, then take photos of the system outside the system, and he’s still outside of it ing in Florida; he’d developed a hobby of exploring
billboards and put them in her gallery. When he told today. Most of the art world doesn’t even know who old buildings in lush, abandoned areas and read the

manuals and books he found there. Before he was copy me,” he says. “And there have been people satisfaction in it, I guess, not because it’s better than
of legal age, he got a job where the requirement was who have tried to do that, but I think that they got what everyone else is doing, but because it’s hard to
knowing how to read blueprints. “I was like, ‘Wow, all very little attention for trying to copy me, because do. It’s so impractical. It’s not a realistic thing to do
I have to do is read these books. It just took a couple everyone was like, ‘Well, that’s kind of cool, but it’s in any way, shape or form. That’s what I like about
of days and then I got a job! I’m getting $4 an hour!’ so much less than SRL.’ It’s not that interesting to it. I’ve grown to appreciate things that are like that
And so that kind of got me going on it. So that’s how be like something else, especially if there’s only a over the years.”
I’ve always approached mechanical things.” couple of people doing it. And you have to be very
inspired to take the time out of your life to build Witnessing one of Mark’s shows is like a near-death
After college he moved to San Francisco and found these things. It’s very hard to do. It’s very, very, very experience, the unexpected and the absolute fear
lots of abandoned industrial complexes like the ones labor intensive and very frustrating and very diffi- space that it creates, but there’s so much more
he explored in Florida. Most of them were complete cult. Most people won’t do that if they aren’t getting beauty in Mark’s work than the violence. But it’s
paid for it. Most people with the skills to do it would bigger than that. It’s bigger than that knee-jerk
90 facilities, rapidly abandoned, harboring technical just do it as a job and make a nice six-figure salary response of being afraid. What it is, is humanitarian.
and call it a day.”
libraries about all their machinery. Mark went ex- Mark hates that I bring this up.
ploring, braving the dogs and barbed wire. He took For Mark, this is not a monetary venture. “I do this
the books he found home and started reading them. stuff ‘cause I like to do it,” he says, “not because I “I think that any kind of benefit that comes from
And then he started taking some of the industrial think I’m going to make any money at it. I’ve been these things is incidental,” he says. “There’s nothing
flotsam out of there. In about a week, he came up doing it for 30-some years and I still haven’t made practical or intentionally beneficial in any way about
with the idea that, with all the abandoned machin- any money at it. So that’s good. That means I’ve any of this stuff. But I think people find beneficial
ery and leftover parts, he could do shows with succeeded. That measure of success has been things and people find the practical, positive as-
machines and robots. All the parts he needed were achieved.” pects of them, but that’s not what I’m trying to do.”
there and he knew how to assemble them. He even
had a vacated warehouse (or twelve) at his disposal I wonder aloud if there’s satisfaction, pride or Back in the lab, Mark kills the Spine Robot and rubs
to build them in. Given the relative ease with which loneliness in knowing he’s the only person in the his eyes.
Mark created his own anti-art, pro-carnage uni- world who does something. “There’s a certain
verse, it surprises me that no one else is doing this.
“The only way to do what I do would be to directly

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Photo by: Ward Robinson

“When I was growing up, I came to appreciate very deeply
the fact that there were people out there doing things that
moved me. And so I really appreciated people who took the
time to create some artifact that I could then participate
in, you know? Movies, books, music, whatever. And I always
felt like that was the greater purpose in life - to be able to
kind of create something that would inspire other people.
I’m trying to create an unforgettable and indelible mark in

people’s imagination.”





Written by: Ward Robinson

I’ve known Mark Grotjahn since we were kids - over 30 years. In the intervening
decades he has gone on to be one of the most important painters of his generation.
Here’s an abbreviated CV: Grotjahn is represented by Blum and Poe in Los Angeles;
Anton Kern in New York, Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, and Gagosian in London.
He has had solo shows at the Whitney, the Hammer, Portland Art Museum, Aspen Art
Museum, Kunstverein Freiburg, Kunstmuseum Thun, and his work can be found in
the permanent collections at the Whitney, MoMA, MoCA, SFMoMA, the Art Institute of
Chicago, LACMA, the Tate, the Stedelijk, and the Hammer, among others. He current-
ly serves as a board member at MoCA in Los Angeles.
A real painter’s painter, Mark is obsessed with working, obsessed with painting and
the history of painting, obsessed with paint and the physicality of paint. Like much
94 excellent art, Mark’s work is instantly engaging and also generously rewards deeper
looking. The more looking you do at his paintings, the clearer it becomes how each
work is the result of decades of slow, methodical progress, built on the struggles and
hard-won triumphs of decades of diligent, solitary exploration into the possibilities of
color, line and method. His work is, in fact, thrilling. While his earlier work was done
either in colored pencil or with a brush, he is currently painting almost exclusively
either with a palette knife or with his hands.
We did the first of our two interviews for this story in his studio with him walking and
talking me through finished work for shows at Blum and Poe in May 2015 and Anton
Kern this September 2015. The second interview was conducted a few weeks later in
a small office space off the main studio.

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Photos by: Ward Robinson

01 having a blank canvas except the composition is done with the eyes
and the nose and the mouth. It’s predetermined. The sculptures are
Tell me about this recent work we are looking at. rudimentary, second grade, 8-year-old, arts and craft-type things:
they are a dick nose on a big piece of cardboard with carved out
eyes, and so in a way it makes it easier in a way to do a pretty paint-
ing on top. There is a long history of bronze painting.
Picasso painted on bronze; Giacometti painted on
bronze. And the way bronze takes oil paint is just... I
just think they are so decadent.

These here are the ‘Indians’, and it’s basically setting up a motif and Several years ago, I started thinking a lot about
exploiting that motif within certain parameters.This one is just really Monet. I saw a show of post Impressionists painters
pretty with its purples and pinks. Some of this palette you see in the years ago. I really like the way they painted with their
sculptures and it just feels like Vienna in the 20s somehow. I want it little dots, and how such a small painting could hold
to be decadent. Right now I want all the paintings to be decadence a room. It’s interesting, because now I’m doing the
and pattern and color and all that. I just want to dive in. I started this smaller paintings, the Indians.
with the idea of those colors that I think of as 20s Vienna. I’m really
excited by the color and the possibility of color. How else do you [Pointing to a sculpture in another part of the room]
spend thousands of hours after thousands of hours unless you’re This is one is a ‘French’. I call these ‘French’ because
obsessed about something in the process that you’re doing? I was painting them like Monet. They’re probably more
“Ab Ex” than Monet but the colors are Monet. There’s
Where does the desire for the shift in what you want out of the paint- a lot of Joan Mitchell in here, but just taking the sea
ing come from? Do you normally have that? and the sky, and doing a landscape like in this kind of
a way....
Not normally, but I like it when I can know the vibe and I can hold
onto that long enough and I can actually see that vibe happening. I The painted sculptures are so different than the paint-
like it when things are going good that’s when I like to paint. I like it ings, it’s a whole new language.
when I’m in the zone, it just takes a while to get there.

96 It’s a new language, and it’s been developing. Now
When you start painting, do you know it’s going to be for a show of I feel like I’m in a place to really exploit it, and that
specific works grouped together, or does that happen later? opens up a lot of possibilities. It’s nice to come down

This body of work is painted for the show and the vibe I want to here on a day that it’s overcast and be talking to you
get across. and not really be working and have a chance to really
look at it. That’s something I don’t do enough of. I’m

You paint for the space and the vibe you want to get across, you so compulsive in nature that if I’m not working - and
know you might want a different vibe for a different place. And this for me that means physically making something - then
is what I want to do now here. I wanted to do just five big paintings in the time is wasted.

one room-they have three rooms-and leave the other rooms blank. There is so much playfulness in the application of
I started these big paintings and I was going and I don’t know why the paint. I mean, you’re finger painting! It does feel
but they didn’t work. They didn’t work and so I did scrape those and like there’s a lot of joy in how you made it and a lot of
they were terrible. Going through periods where it goes bad, where I exploration.
feel like I don’t know what to do, where I feel like it’s controlling me

and I’m being a pussy, is part of the deal but still, having said that, it There is a lot of exploration and there are moments of
still affects me on an emotional level. joy, but I think they look more joyful to make than they

I started doing some small works to see where that would take me, actually were. I think there’s always a lot of panic and
and this is where it took me. I just went with it. We are two months there are moments of grace.

before the show, and I have the 10 Indians painted. In the past, I’ve On top of everything else it is really pretty paint.
always been done at least six months before the opening, so for me

to work until the end like this is unusual. I can’t say I enjoy it. I don’t It is really pretty paint, and it is a moderately unusual
like making a painting knowing that it has to be good enough to put way to paint. I like that. I don’t know how as a thinking
in a show. I’d rather make too many, and then edit some out. person you would decide to do that kind of pretty paint,

you know?

I have a show with Anton Kern in September (2015) and I’m gonna

show painted sculptures. I paint these with my hands. They are

bronze. I make them in cardboard and I cast it so it’s almost like

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Photos by:
Ward Robinson

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