An Ode to the LA Underground: “La La Land Still Stands”
John Dolmayan's Torpedo Gallery linked up with Claire Hill's Civilized Chaos to curate a striking series that fuses art and musical performance to benefit LA fire relief. Down the rabbit hole I go...
The spirit of LA persists in little, secret ways.
It was my birthday weekend and I had just returned to LA from a week of horrors at a Holiday Inn Express in Lake Elsinore, California. I was happy to be back in LA. I didn’t want to turn 27. I didn’t want to have this nagging desire to write. I didn’t really even want to be me anymore. I wondered if I had depression and I worried about it. I paid five hundred dollars for a king bed and a big wooden desk and a mini fridge and filled my time with self-sabotage and people-pleasing and all my old ways. I had even locked myself into a constant, boundary-less texting conversation with a guy who said he wanted to be friends with me. I knew better but I liked the attention. It backfired into a spiral of guilt and obsession, and I completely wrecked any slim chance I had of progressing my “goddamn novel,” which was the whole point of locking myself away in the Holiday Inn Express to begin with. I was beginning to become entirely sick of myself and I wondered if I would ever break through or break down, or if this perpetual state of emotional limbo was, in fact, the breakdown.
I had got it in my head that I would be able to get more writing done away from the city and all its yearning and desperation and its exponential energies of its general fame-starved, celebrity-ridden population. I was wrong. I spent the week reluctantly slinking around parking lots and side doors and drinking whiskey and soda with ice and smoking parliaments and rereading old unfinished passages that I had written. I was doing very little writing and a terrible amount of drinking, worrying, overthinking and texting. There was nothing else to do. There was an In-N-Out and a Shell gas station and a strip mall and I felt that I could be anywhere in America and it felt impossible to do anything creative in a place so devoid of any sort of meaning besides calories and fuel. The only ocean around was the endless parade of freeway passengers in vehicles going god knows where. The sky was dark and cold and it was raining and there was nothing good on TV. But then again, hell is your own goddamn mind, and there was something soothingly eternal about my self-inflicted hotel purgatory.
I begrudgingly missed the wilderness of LA, where at least people were doing things other than eating lukewarm burgers and guzzling gas and going somewhere else. I was beginning to feel like a massive failure, and beginning to hate my cringe self more and more every time I unironically mentioned my unwritten “great American novel,” and i began to wonder whether I was turning into a spitting image of my father, an incredibly talented, under-appreciated artist who never quite reached the level of fame he deserved. Am I destined to always have the wrong impressions and never really know what’s really going on? Has the pursuit of truth and beauty finally been slain by the greedy churn of Public Relations and Press Releases? These things weighed on me as I forced myself to type out my wretched thoughts from the plane to Miami Music Week.
It was in this bizarre frame of reference that I chugged a Celsius just before 8PM and walked into Torpedo Gallery in North Hollywood. It was Civilized Chaos’ “La La Land Still Stands” art show, a series running from March 8-10, curated and organized by Vlada Kova. The show featured the art of Cory Danziger, Jamie Phanekham, Ted Pallas, Kevin James Barry, and Steve Erle. The series was launched as a community response to the LA fire disasters, “a night celebrating the resilience of La La Land.” A portion of the proceeds was pledged to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
John Dolmayan, drummer of System of the Down, founded Torpedo Gallery, and soon after joined forces with Claire Hill’s production company, Civilized Chaos.
I didn’t know it at the time, but when I entered the gallery, I had fallen straight down an LA scene rabbit hole. I was in entirely unfamiliar territory. I knew about dance clubs, jam bands and festival wookery, but I will forever love delving into a good scene. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a scenester, it doesn’t even matter what scene it is.
And if there’s one thing I love about LA, it’s that everyone and every scene is here. Every scene and every dream. So I held onto my notebook and pen for dear life and battened down a tapestry of Green Jellÿ, The Whiskey A Go-Go, medical marijuana lore, Jesse Hughes, and West Hollywood moods and set sail down the gleaming, babbling river of LA’s past, present, and future.
Vlada Kova, Gallery Curator at Civilized Chaos, welcomed me warmly and invited me on a tour of the gallery. As we strolled, she shared nuggets of knowledge about select pieces that were in the collection. We stood in front of Jamie Phanekham’s “All of the Heirlooms Are Avon,” and Vlada expounded on how unexpected pieces of memory stick in the mind.
Richard Eastman, who I didn’t know at the time but got to know over the course of the night, immediately spotted my thrifted leather jacket and said, “That’s a cool jacket!”
“Thanks,” I said, and smiled because I knew he meant it.
Richard offered to take a photo with me. I held up my phone and Richard held up a potato chip.
“Now you’re the only person in the whole world with a picture of me with a potato chip,” he said.
It made me curious about his story, and he seemed to be in the everlasting mood to share it.
Eastman’s stature is tall, grand. He donned a weathered blue jean jacket, with patches and some sort of leopard print, paint splattered, a multi-colored peace sign bandana peaking out front under a brimmed hat covered in sundry pins of Smokey the Bear and a hemp leaf. I tried to take in his whole look and pull out elements to clue me in, but the individual parts that informed his being remained elusive. The sum of those parts, however, was screamingly clear — he was, as Claire described aptly, “a hippie godfather.”
Richard told me about helping to save the Hollywood sign in 1977 with Alice Cooper, and after a little internet digging I learned that Eastman served on the HIV Commission appointed by the LA County board of supervisors. He worked with the commission to establish California’s medical marijuana program. He also co-founded the LA Cannabis Buyers Club in 1995 for patients living with HIV/AIDs, MS, glaucoma, and other illnesses. AKA a bonafide legend. Through unyielding passion and perseverance, Eastman pioneered the use of marijuana as treatment for chronic illness, while destigmatizing and proving the use of cannabis as medicine.
Fun fact, Richard Eastman is member #1069 of Green Jellÿ.
“They cut your underwear off when you’re dead,” Richard Eastman said, offhand, as he handed me a copy of The Lost Anarchy Magazine, a local zine that has been in circulation for twenty years.
He offered to sign it for me too. I accepted.
“Where might I find this zine in the wild?” I asked.
“The Rainbow and Whiskey A Go Go,” Richard told me, “it's where I hang out when I’m not in the gayborhood.”
Sometime after the show, I hopped on a call with Civilized Chaos founder Claire Hill. She burst onto the airwaves with a faint yet irresistible Southern drawl, and called me darlin, and I couldn’t help but be charmed half to death. We immediately acknowledged the emotional upheavals and chaos of the recent spring equinox and mercury retrograde. I started in on my awkward yet earnest journalistic queries, and she graciously offered a piece of the “why.”
“One of the most rewarding things about doing all these different events and, you know, working with all these different artists across so many different mediums is really building a wonderful community and allowing for a lot of like-minded, incredible people to find one another,” Claire said.
Claire elaborated humbly on the infrastructure of Civilized Chaos. “We've done so many different things and I really enjoy that. It's kind of almost like an umbrella company for me and my friends that, you know, are all creatives and whatever ideas we have,” she said.
Founded in 2023, Civilized Chaos runs the gamut of entertainment endeavors, from comedy to live music, live culinary experiences and even underground rave production in LA. “I’ve also done artist management, drag shows, karaoke, disco nights. I mean, you name it, we've kind of had our hands in it,” Hill said.
While Civilized Chaos manifests in a multitude of artistic platforms across the globe, the heartbeat of the organization can be found in LA. “I think that it would be impossible to remove the influence of LA from anything that I do myself or through my company for sure [...] There is no place in the world like Los Angeles and there's never going to be,” Claire said.
Claire brings it up to the present, “Right now we're mainly focused in the areas of fine art and independent film, documentaries and narratives.”
At the gallery, I was feeling somewhat self conscious, per usual, and my pen and notepad felt sort of useless in my clammy, caffeinated hand. I was drawn to Kevin James Barry’s painting, “Jesse,” and I clunkily asked Kevin for some of the story. “You’re an artist, would you like to chat?”
“Sure,” he said. Kevin told me about how he saw the LA Weekly cover of Jesse Hughes, painted it, posted it to facebook, and garnered the attention of Hughes himself via Instagram, who likened Barry’s artistic talent to Van Gogh’s. Barry and Hughes ended up connecting and now Barry is currently filming a rock documentary about Hughes, “Boots Electric.”
I was about to ask a follow up but the band, Thinky Flesh, was about to go on and Kevin began setting up his video camera. The drums lurched to start and Kevin haphazardly dragged the camera along on its stand, to a point of such disregard that I became curious to see the end result.
Slim Jelly, band lead and bass player, handed out ear plugs. I thought that was kind of a sweet and unexpected gesture for a “proto-punk weirdo rock group.”
As I jotted this note down, Slim, with a rat mask on, scuttled up to me on all fours and startled me out of my note taking. “Is it okay? Is it okay?” she said.
I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or acting out a part. Her eyes were at once on mine and suddenly nowhere, a void. She turned away from me, crawled back to her Kramer “The Duke” bass guitar and the band startled into action.
Thinky Flesh was jamming out, Slim animatedly shredding, knees to the ground, guests mingling and sipping wine. The art enveloped the space and made it easy to get lost in the music. The ordinary sense of time-passage that usually hounds me went silent as I grooved to the relentless drum rhythm and driving bassline.
“This is boring, I don't wanna do it anymore,” she said, mid-set. The impulsive honesty was infectious. I, for one, was having fun. I decided to fully let loose and dance around the room.
“Slim is a star. She is amazing. I love watching her perform live. She used to be one of the lead members of Green Jellÿ before focusing on her solo career, which I'm really excited about,” Hill asserted.
I interviewed Slim after the set and she shared the push that led her to really start making music. “I would make up songs all the time and [coworkers] would be like, ‘Is that a real song?’ and I would be like, ‘What do you mean like what is a real song? Like obviously it's a real song. I just sang it, didn’t I?’ […] So they were like ‘You should make music.’ And so I started making music.”
“We’re Thinky Flesh,” Slim said during the set. “You can find us wherever you find yourself.”
You can also find Thinky Flesh on tour now, shredding their way through the East Coast.
The music didn’t stop there. A couple days later on March 10, the gallery hosted another vibey musical performance by the Jake Chapman Trio, with namesake Jake Chapman on vibraphone, Marc Gasway on bass, and David Myles Lewis on drums.
The idea of uniting an art gallery space with musical performance is one of those pairings that just makes sense. “Art should be for the people,” Claire said. “‘Civilized Chaos’ is going to have that interdisciplinary nature, because I think it's really not utilized enough in a lot of events and entertainment in modern society.”
Civilized Chaos is not new to the synthesis of art and music. The first exhibition that launched at Torpedo Gallery, organized by Vlada Kova, was an exhibition by Angelo Moore, AKA Dr Madd Vibe, lead singer of Los Angeles based Ska-Punk group, Fishbone.
“One of [Moore’s] dreams was to bring together his art and his music in one space, and we were able to do that,” Hill shared.
SooOoo. What's next for Civilized Chaos?
“One of the things to look forward to that we're talking about doing next is, you know, staying with a similar theme of LA, with a venue that I've done a lot of work with before, Monk Space, that really caters well to sort of immersive and interactive experiences. We're going to be looking at doing sort of an interactive, immersive experience that combines all of the sights, smells, sounds, whatever, [...] into an art exhibition about LA,” Claire shared.
After everyone had left and the wines and cheese boards had dwindled, I had one question, “wait so what is Green Jellÿ?” Ray showed me the youtube video of Green Jellÿ’s “The Three Little Pigs.”
“Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!” Tool vocalist, Maynard James Keenan wailed.
Ray chuckled and admitted that when he was an adolescent he had never seen something quite so cool. I later went on a deep dive about Green Jellÿ and learned about the “franchise band,” and watched their VICE short.
“Do you think guys and girls can be friends?” I asked Vlada, late at night when we drank beers on the couch after the gallery opening.
It felt like I had reached some heart of it. Some beating chunks of green jello and gritty, persistent punk sentiment, held together by paint and print and tape and the absurd, wonderful human tendency to create, create, create.
My phone call with Claire got a bit philosophical, as we exchanged frustrations with the current music industry climate and how underground scenes are fighting to exist.
“I get very upset with that because I know so many incredibly talented musicians that will probably never reach the level of fame and notoriety that they deserve. But then again, they buried Mozart in a mass grave. So what can we really say about how musical genius is appreciated?” Claire said.
Maybe fame is just the frail crystalline byproduct, the throwaway chemical at the end of the reaction. Art is the real thing, the prized set of molecules that we all seek so desperately. And sometimes, it's right there in front of our eyes, the real deal, all along. And so we make scenes and we shake our asses to the beat and we party until the bitter end. We resist. We weave threads of life and create myths about things that don’t really exist, like Los Angeles. And that night at Torpedo Gallery, Los Angeles felt real and available, suspended in solidarity within the underground current of tales that reside in walls and wails and beating drums, pins and paper and pens and ink and oil.
Check out what’s brewing in Civilized Chaos’ corner of La La Land.
You can also view the entire contents of the “La La Land Still Stands” curation at Vlada Kova’s virtual collection.