Why I Love Mike Watt

[PGP]

While he may take a lot of pictures of pelicans and San Pedro sunsets, he
also sends out gems like these:

http://209.193.84.198/naomi/naomi.html

Naomi, SST and All That...

Naomi Petersen, 1964 - 2003

Joe Carducci

Naomi's parents met at a U.S. Army-sponsored dance in Tokyo in 1956.
Leroy Petersen was serving in Army Intelligence tracking Soviet
submarines in the Sea of Japan. Takeyo Kashimura was the daughter of
a Buddhist priest in Yokohama. They married in Japan and this was no
small event for Takeyo's family; the war was just ten years over and
the occupation had only ended four years earlier. Americans were
accepted, though not often loved. They moved back to his hometown
where they were again married, and neither was this a small event in
Logan, Utah even where the State U. tempers the Mormon faith. They
had a son Christopher and moved to southern California in the early
sixties so Takeyo would be near other Japanese. They lived first in
Wilmington and Carson. For Naomi's birth in 1964 they returned to
Japan so she would have dual citizenship. While in Japan for this
year Leroy studied raku ceramics under Kaneshige, a designated
National Living Treasure. Naomi grew up in Tarzana, Reseda,
Chatsworth and Simi Valley as her father taught art in middle and
high school. Her parents named their daughter well as Naomi is also a
proper name in Japan where it means "above all, beauty"; the western
Naomi derives from the Hebrew term for pleasantness. Predictably,
Naomi hated her name. (Her middle name, Kay, is a contraction of her
mother's name.)

Chris tells me that his sister was a popular, involved student in the
Chatsworth middle school (ballet, baseball, girl scouts, good
grades...), but found the residual cowboy culture at Simi Valley High
in Ventura County rough going - Simi Valley is separated from the San
Fernando Valley by the county line at Santa Susana Pass. Naomi might
have passed as Japanese but her hair was auburn; she was what today a
far more secure bi-racial kid might refer to with a laugh as a halfie
(Japanese usage: hafu). Chris and Naomi resisted their mother's
attempts to teach them Japanese. Chris writes, "We didn't want to be
thought of as foreign kids!"

Naomi caught interest in rock music from her brother:

"I remember taking her to her first big concert... She sat on my
shoulders to watch the Rolling Stones (7.24.78, Anaheim Stadium), but
she disappeared only to get squashed along on the front fence and had
to be pulled out by security." (Christopher Petersen, August 1, 2005)

There's your thirteen year-old Naomi, straight into the fire! Chris
found his shaken-up sister later at the Red Cross tent. He also took
her to see Queen, Kiss and others; Naomi snuck a small instamatic
into these shows and I've seen her shots of these bands from the
cheap seats. I've also seen her middle school snapshots of the cute
boys smiling for her camera, and can picture those redneck girls
hating this exotic interloper come high school... Chris went off to
UCLA and Naomi began to push against her parents' rules. In Simi
Valley she gravitated to the small punk circle and began to wear
black and dye her hair red or purple. Naomi had her brother take her
to see the Clash (Palladium, 10.11.79); her taste in music had
changed.

In 1980 Naomi got a car, a job and a camera and commenced what her
brother refers to as her "escalated lifestyle."

We first saw Naomi in Summer 1981; she had just turned 17 and was
skipping the last year of high school. Henry Rollins had replaced Dez
Cadena as vocalist for Black Flag; Dez moved to 2nd guitar. The
others in the band were Greg Ginn on guitar, Chuck Dukowski on bass,
and Robo on drums. The troop at SST also included roadie Mugger,
still 17, and sound-man/producer Spot. Dez's friend Dave Claassen
soon started making himself useful; Mike Watt and D. Boon of the
Minutemen also pulled hours at times. I had just come down from
Systematic Record Distribution in Berkeley. (At one of the last
Dez-on-vocals gigs - Chicago, Tut's, 7.15.81 - I offered to come down
and help run the SST office; Greg jumped at my offer though he
laughed that they didn't really have an office and they also had no
money - sounded good to me!) Promoter Mike Sheppard was to begin
booking for SST but never showed. When I asked Chuck where he was, he
put thumb and finger to lips and inhaled - international sign
language for "pothead." Chuck continued booking with help from Irving
Plaza's Chris Gremsky in New York, and a bit later Jordan Schwartz.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Los Angeles, especially
for this small town Midwestern boy, were the young girls that would
show up at the gigs. SoCal seemed full of broken families, and the
loosed kids fully mobile. They might be as young as 13 when they
began to float around the city, traveling in cars driven by older
friends. The hip girl from crosstown might show up at the gig with
some sullen teenager-with-a-car who collected his blowjob and was
off. Black Flag shows were far-flung into all corners of the greater
southland, and such was the hunger for music we could stand, that
gigs in San Diego, Phoenix and San Francisco were often treated as
local shows. Once in 82, with Black Flag out touring, Dave, Rosetta
and I drove the 400 miles up to SF to see the Toiling Midgets play.
We saw them, said hello to friends who thought we were nuts because
up there they don't leave "The City" for nothing, and then drove
right back to L.A. (Davo the drivah in training - he later logged
more miles than anyone south of the space program as he drove for
Black Flag, Firehose, and the Meat Puppets; hope he's okay.)

Driving back up to West Hollywood in the van one day in 81, Henry and
I, the newbies, listened as Mugger told some crazed sex story about
one of his feral buddies. I commented, "Everyone's a little randier
out here." Henry, who I did not yet know, looked over and said
"Yeah!" like he meant it. Chuck said something about American social
geography and Darwinian anthropology. One time Chuck summarized his
biology-based version of Hobbes' All Against All, to which Greg
responded, "Yeah, but there's friends." (See Chuck's song, "My War"
for his response.) Friends... Enemies... It would all be proved true,
and still explain nothing.

When Black Flag's "Damaged" album was finally finished, Spot recorded
the Meat Puppets' first album at Unicorn's studio by the Tropicana in
West Hollywood. Unicorn Records, owned by Daphna Edwards and
distributed by MCA, was an estrogen mafia making a suicide run at the
charts with albums by a German pop star, an Argentinian new wave duo,
and the second engineer on some Pink Floyd album. Unfortunately, we
threw the "Damaged" album into this pipeline; we almost threw
everything into it: Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, Meat Puppets...
Unicorn was a wide-open sugar trap right down to the orgy in Daphna's
Mulholland Drive mansion, which I slept through.

Laurie O'Connell of the band/art-project Monitor-World Imitation
managed the Meat Puppets and somehow this led her to the
receptionist's job at Unicorn. Laurie was part of a circle that
included writer-artist Boyd Rice, painter Jeffrey Vallance, and
musician Fred Nilsen (B People, Los Angeles Free Music Society) - a
very influential fount of ideas, music and art. I was pleased to have
arranged this collision of her neo-hippie/dada with the marauding,
art brut of Black Flag. Laurie took Theresa, one of these floating
young girls, under her wing for this short while. Theresa was thought
to be a girl Black Flag had once run across and remembered as
Vaseline Woman, though she proved to be another girl entirely thus
earning the distinction of being called by her name. (Other memorable
handles assigned to members of the girl parade: Coughing Disease
Woman, Tomato Juice Woman, Duct Tape Woman, Rapunzel, Crusty
Christie...) Laurie compared SST to a locker room, though she smiled
as she said it. Her marriage to Steve Thomsen, the quiet genius
behind Monitor-W.I., was then foundering on the rocks of the Meat
Puppets' Curt Kirkwood.

Meanwhile, just outside SST on Santa Monica Blvd the hustlers stared
into traffic two to a block until dawn; the girls worked Sunset. You
could sell blood at the Red Cross office on Melrose; there was a line
forming every morning before they opened. Somewhere out there was
Greg's ex-girlfriend, Medea, who was part of the band's early Hermosa
Beach brain-trust. She can be glimpsed behind the band with Spot and
Greg's brother Raymond Pettibon in the 1979 Black Flag interview
segment of the film, The Decline of Western Civilization. Medea was
Hispanic and brought graffiti and a street-smart fearlessness into
the operation; when the cops mobilized to track down the Black Flag
graffiti-perps she tagged the station. She was a tough, broken girl
ultimately lost to the street; see her song, "Room 13" on the
"Damaged" album wherein she commands of Greg, "Keep me alive!" over
and over. (This singular lyric has never been sung by a woman which
makes it Medea's creepy crawl of Black Flag and men in general; on
the West Memphis 3 "Rise Above" benefit record it's sung by the
Slipknot dude, not Exene.) Greg's answer songs include "Life of Pain"
(first line: "Look what you've done to your arms!"), and "Bastard In
Love," wherein he insists, "My love is real," over and over. SST was
something more than a locker room.

In late 1981 it was still a few months before "colonic irrigation"
ads in the L.A. Weekly warned, "Death begins in the colon," and two
years before the naming of the Aids virus and a final ending of the
sixties. Thurston Moore called punk a nihilist hippie movement. Maybe
in the end punk was simply the nihilist phase of hippie. And never
more nihilist than as it expired unnoticed in the mid-80s beneath the
ascension of a more purely middle class college-based alt-rock. And
yet, there are no nihilists - just people, kids...

Naomi was troubled, and so were we all; she fit right in.

I remember a commotion one night in Fall 81 in the SST offices behind
Unicorn. I barely knew the guys but there was suddenly sex in the
air; Mugger made a great barometer. He said laughing, "Come on,
Carducci!" I ignored him and continued working on what was my first
task, collating the media, distribution, and retail information I
brought with me from Systematic with what SST had amassed. I looked
up and saw only the outline of a girl entering through to the
practice room and did not inquire further, but I now believe that was
Naomi.

There was something of a toll that women or girls paid when they got
next to Black Flag. It was a little different in Los Angeles where
the band was approachable under more normal conditions and perhaps
better behaved; they went out to see bands virtually every night that
they were not playing. On tour it was Mugger who beat the drum for
girls who wanted to meet the band in the short hours between load-in
and load-out at the club. A classic picture of this was painted by
the political Texas band, M.D.C., in Maximum Rock 'n Roll, wherein
the complaint lodged ran along the lines: You listen to Black Flag's
records and it's all pain and anger and then they show up in your
town, pile out of their van and go, "Dude, where are the broads? Get
it happening!" In Spot's liner notes for the "Everything Went Black"
compilation of early Black Flag recordings (required reading), he
recounts his own first impressions of Greg:

"Sometime in 1976 I began writing music reviews for the local
newspaper... This is when I first encountered Greg Ginn.... Here was
someone totally out of step with the sunshine and the surf and the
skateboards.... [H]e said how he wanted to start his own band. I
thought, 'What? This geek in a band?' So I asked, 'What kind of
band?' He answered, 'A punk band.' That was it! I couldn't hold it
back! I laughed in his face and said, 'That's the most ludicrous
thing I've ever heard!' But the geek didn't blink." (Spot, Fall 1982)

The band was full of high school losers - a perverse mix of brainy
types and manic physical types. The brainy took courage from the
fearlessness of the physical ones, and the physical learned from the
brainy to be smarter about applying their energy. Within music they
found, in classic south bay surfer-boho fashion, that in simply
deciding to live as if the hierarchies around them did not exist they
created a sexy anti-glamour for themselves. Interesting girls with
their own struggle against these hierarchies would respond. These
girls' numbers alone probably got Black Flag kicked out of Torrance
in March 81.

In the early eighties the members of Black Flag were still, say, a
couple years from having their high school ids sated. Often for the
girls it was a simple matter of exploring the world in the short
years before settling down. But in Naomi's case, even at seventeen,
it appears she had her own plan.

I myself first noted her as the stylish Asian-looking girl at a gig
at the Cuckoo's Nest in Costa Mesa. She would have driven over sixty
miles from her home in Simi Valley through Los Angeles to get to this
good-sized Orange County club. Black Flag at this point was unable to
play in L.A. due to the LAPD's excessive interest, and they were
playing smaller, outlying mailing list- and locally promoted gigs so
as to get the new line-up in gear. Naomi stood out because the O.C.
punk rabble was young, sullen and largely white and male. She wore on
this occasion dark sharkskin bouffant skirts and black blouse and
sweater, very girlish except for all that black on black. Knowing
nothing about her, my first impression was that a guy could get lost
in all those ruffles, layers and black. The few other girls there
were either slack beach girls or O.C. punkettes with far less flair.
At one point between bands, Scranny, Wasted Youth's singer ran up to
the microphone and apropos not much ordered the kids to "Destroy this
place!" (Black Flag often found itself shoring up beleaguered
entrepreneurs by deliberately crossing punk rock boycotts: Posh-boy,
Dirk Dirksen in SF, and here, promoter Jerry Roach.) The crowd
ignored Scranny; they wanted to see Black Flag play, wanted to see
this new singer, Henry Rollins. Scranny, perhaps did not; he scowled
and trudged back up the office stairwell and lumped it and the raging
performance that followed. Henry was going to work out, needless to
say.

Mugger told me later that this girl Naomi was Robo-scam, which for
Mugger constituted discretion. I nodded thoughtfully at this
information, no doubt. Robo was probably thirty then; he spoke
English with a heavy Colombian accent, and with his military bearing
you easily heard his curt imperatives shouted at the kids (Mugger,
Bill Stevenson). Everyone's favorite was the commanded question,
"Mugger/Billy, why you space out?!" There would be a pause, and then
he would repeat, "WHY!?" and the clipped cadence and the accent
seemed juiced by an cosmic bleat of abject incomprehension.

Naomi had a very good ear for music and though this alone might
explain her attraction to Black Flag/SST, I also think the casual
mixed provenance of our scene looked inviting to her. At the gigs you
saw this, while if all you did was read the papers you'd think Black
Flag was the leading edge of young white racism - what a joke! Other
than the greats at Slash magazine and Richard Meltzer at the L.A.
Reader, writers in those years simply did not speak Los Angeles - the
Germs, X, and others had similar problems with the gathering P.C.
consensus common elsewhere.

It was already becoming clear that we would have a falling out with
Unicorn over "Damaged" (and with Laurie over the Meat Puppets). It
was nice to be up near Tower Records and the Whisky (though our bands
could no longer play there) but we were all glad when Greg and Chuck
decided to move the office down to a Redondo Beach space. (We
actually debated whether to cob the coffee machine from Unicorn; we
did and it was the only thing we ever got.) Mugger now answered the
phone, "SST-at-the-beach, how may I help you?" One time I heard him
answer, "SST Records, how about a blow?" And then laughing, "Ohh!
Sorry Mrs. Ginn! I thought you were D. Boon... Lurch, it's your Mom."

This SST was a one-room office with a shower for a hundred dollars a
month. Unfortunately we were a mile and a half from the beach; I
missed the golden age when Black Flag had been able to sleaze by
right off the Hermosa strand. Spot hung in Hollywood for awhile, and
Dez moved in with his folks. Dez's dad Ozzie booked the Lighthouse in
Hermosa Beach and produced dozens of sessions for Savoy Records.
(Spot's dad was a Tuskegee Airman in WWII and he came by once and
everyone jumped up to meet him; God knows what he made of his wayward
son's menagerie of pals! Mr. Ginn happened by as well and the two
flyboys traded war stories at Phelan Avenue SST.) Henry slept on the
concrete floor for a couple weeks, then moved in with Rosetta for a
time. Robo was illegal and had not been allowed back into the country
after a December 81 tour of England. He was replaced short-term by
Bill Stevenson of the Descendents who lived in Hermosa Beach a couple
doors from the Ginns.

One night in 82 after a gig Naomi drove her car back to SST and
rendezvoused with Mugger in the van. According to Mugger she expected
him to stay with her, but Mugger was something of a burn artist as a
teenager and he had no intention to accommodate her. Naomi was
apparently drunk enough to get angry with him, but when he
disappeared into SST to go to sleep under his desk she could only get
into her car and drive home. Hours later the phone rang. Lights were
out and I heard Chuck answer quietly, wait, and then tell someone to
come over. Naomi shortly came into SST weeping, and bleeding from her
wrists. As Chuck led her to the sink she explained to him that her
father had called her a tramp and wouldn't let her back into the
house. She had cut herself, gotten scared and called, throwing
herself on Black Flag's mercy. Perhaps that seems a counter-intuitive
move, but I think it was smart of her.

Chuck was good with her that night; Mugger wouldn't stay with her, so
one trauma and two hours later he did under his desk - a door laid
across two short filing cabinets with a piece of heavy carpet nailed
across the front - the only private space in the office. Chuck, Greg,
and Spot were the adults and by then had experience with many girls
who might be some combination of fragile, damaged, desperate, driven
and self-destructive; these girls were often also very intelligent,
sensitive and fearless. For all Naomi knew, left alone to Los Angeles
at 3am, Mugger would answer the phone and hang up on her. Brave
girl... The next morning Chuck introduced Naomi to me and told me she
had a camera. I had been complaining for months that I couldn't get
the new bands photographed. If I remember correctly, Naomi cocked her
head slightly and smiled, shook my hand, seemed glad to meet me and
thrilled to talk about setting up photo sessions with the bands. The
night's trauma seemed out of her mind like a bad dream; she certainly
knew I'd heard the whole thing as my mattress was open to the room.
The bandages on her wrists didn't inhibit her. What a girl... (Mugger
kept quiet that morning and tells me that Chuck later yelled at him
for treating her like that.)

We didn't keep great house at SST; you could see the battles of
natural selection rage over the months as first the cockroaches got
the upper hand, then the spiders as they feasted on roach eggs, and
then back again. A single drop of Naomi's blood lasted on the
bathroom floor for almost a year, until Greg's girlfriend Roseanne
stayed the night and went at the whole mess like a Latina tornado.

Naomi solved a major problem for us, as SST was beginning to release
records and book gigs for the Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, Saint
Vitus, Meat Puppets, Stains, Overkill, Angst, and others. I could not
get the photographers Black Flag counted on (Glen Friedman, Ed
Colver) to cover these bands in 1982/3. Mike and D. also set Naomi up
to shoot their New Alliance label bands: Descendents, Husker Du,
Secret Hate, Tragicomedy, Nip Drivers, Slovenly, Phantom Opera...

Naomi loved it; she used her camera to steady and focus her interest
in music and musicians and earn standing. As Spot put it recently,
"she seemed to have found the road she needed to be on." She made
peace with her parents and her father converted their laundry-room
into her darkroom. We managed to pay for her film, paper and
chemicals.

Mugger was still growing up; he was a sixth grade drop-out who lived
on the beach until he ran across Black Flag and impressed Greg with
his capacity for work and organization. He would refer to Greg as his
father as he hadn't had one. Henry writes, "If you ever made a
(complaining) noise about anything, Mugger would just start laughing
and say something like, 'This isn't Van Halen! Get it happening!'"
(Get in the Van, 2.13.61) Mugger was famous for many things but was
voted "Asshole of the Year 1983" by the readers of Flipside for his
work assisting stage-divers reach the proper velocity. He was our
paymaster and thereafter treated Naomi with respect, though the
natural voltage of her personality did seem to drop around him. In
her address book, which her brother Chris let me look through, she
editorialized after only one name, Mugger's. Just the word
"Fascismo," one of the old SST buzzwords, generally used as a
begrudging compliment - coined by Mugger or maybe Chuck Biscuits,
derived from the Dukowski maxim, "Anarchy for me, Fascism for you."

With SST back in the south bay, I inevitably stumbled into the
typesetting and photo-labs in the Torrance area that Greg and Chuck
had taken stuff to a year earlier. They worried that these places had
been among the businesses that narced them out to the cops. But the
only problem I encountered was cleaning up unpaid bills or bounced
checks caused by the eviction. These mom and pop businesses by and
large loved us and our crazy shit. They all read the papers about
what a menace Black Flag was... But they had liked Greg, Chuck,
Mugger, Spot, Raymond and Mike and they liked me. The first Black
Flag sleeve and flyers were done at a printer in South Central run by
(I'm guessing) a black-Greek family. Son John Macias worked for his
dad there, saw a flyer and decided to check out a gig and became one
of the more forbidding characters of the early eighties as lead
singer of Circle One. I was glad I'd shaken his hand at the
printer's, because you did not want to be some unknown hippie when
John turned his back to the stage and from inside the pit glared back
at the crowd looking for trouble. John was a Christian; he would
charge the door at punk gigs and the security jocks would all run to
stop him, while his followers would then break through into the hall
for free. (Ten years later John was reportedly preaching a sermon
when the cops interrupted him. You don't interrupt John Macias when
he's preaching the word of God! He faced them down unarmed and was
shot to death.)

Spot found that one of the owners of Media Art, the Hermosa Beach
recording studio where the first SST (and early Posh-Boy and
Dangerhouse) releases were recorded, had opened a new studio in
Redondo Beach. Total Access made it possible for us to record bands
on credit, get the records out, get paid and then pay their bill.
John Golden at K-Disc Mastering was another great asset; each session
to cut lacquers for new releases came complete with a further
good-humored lesson in the technical history of the recording arts.
To their amazement, no doubt, Wyn Davis at Total Access and John
Golden found their generosity to SST repaid years later as new bands
and labels sought them out for that very connection to us.

SST had found the Virco pressing plant in Alhambra via the south bay
band, the Last. And through SST, Virco was soon cranking on New
Alliance, Slash-Ruby, Frontier, Posh-Boy, and Unicorn label catalog.
Virginia Watts ran it with her husband and we got to know this
elderly couple well. Mike Watt took special interest in the
mechanical aspects of what they did there and heard sixties Nashville
lore from their pressman, Hank. We printed covers at Stoughton
Printing in City of Industry. Mike dealt with owner Jack Stoughton,
another WWII vet, and every time Mike reordered the Husker Du "Land
Speed Record" covers with the photos of be-medalled, flag-draped
coffins, Jack would give Mike a little lecture about the boys who
didn't come home. I worked with Jack's son, Ace, and considered
myself lucky to not have to try to explain Pettibon artwork to Jack.
Ace made mild objection to a song-title on the Sluts album ("Mom's
Cunt") but he knew it wasn't an SST release per se; we were just
helping out some pals - Dave Slut had been the other contender for
the Black Flag mic. Still I sent the Nig-Heist album cover over to
the more corporate Modern Printing out of consideration for the
Stoughton family.

Ten years earlier Virco had been pressing Yazoo, gospel, glee club
records and the last of the hippie independent labels; now they were
choking the chain stores with local punk rock vinyl; Rodney
Bingenheimer was playing a lot of stuff on KROQ and other DJs were
picking up on it too. We'd go up to Virco with a crew of people to
sticker over MCA logos on 25,000 "Damaged" albums covers, or stuff
15,000 Pettibon posters and stickers into "Everything Went Black"
covers to save 3 per (the crew would be us - bits of BF, Minutemen,
SST, and maybe friends like Stella of KXLU and Carmel Moran of No
Mag/Faulty). When Unicorn got an injunction to stop "Everything Went
Black" we couldn't sell the records or pay our bill. We reprinted the
cover with "Black Flag" blacked out and went up again to restuff
those but they were granted another injunction.

Unicorn wasn't paying Virco; turned out they never paid anyone. But
Virco, even as they lost the Slash account and others, refused to
settle with Unicorn and instead incurred their own legal bills taking
them to court as a way of aiding us. By the time we were free of
Unicorn, Virco had lost Hank back to Nashville and were only
brokering jobs out to other plants. Those plants would come to us and
try to cut Virco out, but I ran the Minutemen and Husker Du double
albums, Black Flag "Slip It In," and some other new titles through
them anyway; we owed them more than money. Mike Watt and Greg
understood but Mugger was pushing to save us the money. We were going
to be paying off legal bills for the next decade and though we could
now sell Black Flag records and pay Virco, we couldn't save them.
Ultimately we needed a plant that could run cassettes as well, and
CDs were already being talked about. Several generations of record
industry mom and pops were dying. But it had been to me that Virginia
made her final sales pitch: "You know we love you up here." Those old
girls, they don't fight fair.

Our young girl with camera, meanwhile, shot Saccharine Trust at
practice; she shot Saint Vitus under the power lines behind SST in
Redondo; she shot our bands at gigs, recording sessions, and at SST.
She also shot touring bands when they crashed at SST: Minor Threat,
Bad Brains, Butthole Surfers, Misfits, Big Boys, Dicks, and more I'm
sure. She ran through a Torrance cemetery with Saint Vitus, quickly
shooting set-ups to stay ahead of the groundskeepers (see debut LP
cover). When Saint Vitus were spotted by concerned citizens sprawled
on the sidewalk in front of the Thirsty Club in Redondo (see "Thirsty
and Miserable" EP cover), Naomi skillfully sweet-talked the
responding officers. The guys might have had trouble on their own
convincing the cops they weren't actual derelicts. She shot Suzi
Gardner (then Chuck's girlfriend, later of L7) as Eve-with-apple out
at Spahn Ranch amid startled hunters staked out in the bush, and
though the snake on her shoulders is virtually invisible in the
infra-red image, it made a beautiful cover for Wurm's "Feast" album.
And Naomi shot an insane session with Mugger's band, the Nig-Heist,
backstage at the Cathay de Grande involving what I think the
professionals term "water-sports" - shots that as you look them over
you can all but hear Naomi's laughter egging them on.

As promotional photos from record companies are often run without
credit I generally requested that publications credit her, as
compensation for how little we could pay her. When her restaurant job
allowed, she would come down with her contact sheets and prints and
we'd decide what to run copies of. What a joy she was to work with! I
never called Glen or Ed again.

Naomi became another extra-Black Flag SST character a la Pettibon,
Medea, Spot, Mugger, Davo, Jordan and others. We were the best people
money could buy, yet there was no money. We were all nuts enough to
be doing it for art and action. We required more involvement than any
mere job could provide. Greg and Black Flag's stature made this an
easy, obvious choice - for the guys anyway - and though Greg was not
a romantic we did our best to run on loyalty. If the world didn't
know it yet, we at SST knew that there was nothing occurring anywhere
else in music that was more important than what we were doing - not
out of New York or London, not at independent labels and certainly
not at the major labels. Whenever Spot came out of the studio with
some new, amazing recordings it sent a jolt of confirming, inspiring
energy back through every other band in our orbit; it was all lifting
toward critical mass.

Naomi, like the rest of us, didn't simply run to the brightest
spotlight. She seemed to build her strongest friendships with the
less celebrated bands Saccharine Trust and Saint Vitus; I believe
they were her first shoots for us. Spot bonded with her as they used
the same Nikon - the FTN Photomic, of which Spot says, "Great fuckin'
cameras and built like tanks; you could kill somebody with one in a
fight if you had to." (Spot shot Black Flag from their days as Panic
in 1977, when indeed many a gig might force one to consider one's
defensive options.) Naomi was given her camera by her mother's
brother, Toshio, who Chris writes was a lover of art, photography and
anything American; he also loved to laugh, and followed his father as
temple priest. When Spot saw that Naomi had talent and was serious he
gave her his tripod.

Naomi worked closely with Henry on a series of portraits that made
concrete images out of changes he was making in his life/art. (My
favorite shot of Henry is attached; he tells me this was the one
session that Naomi coached him - she wanted to see power) And she
practically specialized in shots where you can see the easy laughter
going on between artist and subject. She was an insider and got
casual, candid shots of the great musicians of the day. She was
catalyst as well - nothing like the presence of a fun, good-looking
girl to make a band forget how much they hate each other and remember
why they love being in a band. These weren't the shots we could often
use for PR purposes but they constitute an important part of her work.

Henry put together an amazing batch of photos from all comers for Get
in the Van; Naomi's 25 range from fierce, full-band portraits of
Black Flag live in Richmond and Torrance, to the post-performance
glow of October Faction (the model for Joe Baiza's cover drawing on
their first album), to horseplay for Naomi by Minor Threat, by Ian
and Henry, by Henry and Nick Cave, and a striking shot of Henry and
Chuck wherein Chuck - Henry's true sponsor in the band until Greg's
traumatic, year-long, slo-mo firing of him - looks happy again one
year on. (When the Unicorn legal battle put Black Flag on ice for 83
Chuck reunited his old band, Wurm, and began a new band Swa with Ted
Falconi of Flipper. As Gremsky had no band to book he returned to
Poland to work for Solidarnosc.) To Naomi these horseplay shots were
not publicity photos taken for me or the media; they were taken as if
for some mutant family album, her own documentation that these were
her friends.

I gave Naomi the fool's errand of trying for full-band live shots,
which, aside from composition and lighting questions (always problems
in the dumps our bands played), are near impossible to grab. Finding
that moment and perspective when all three or four or five players
have eyes open and non-dork expressions on their faces and no mic
booms or guitar necks or stage-divers or security obscuring them, and
no hangers-on lined up behind their amps looking bored is virtually
impossible. While concentrating through the viewfinder a photographer
at those gigs might also easily find herself landed on by some
airborne burrhead; indeed in more than one shot of Naomi one can see
bruises and scratches all over her ankles. But she found more clean
full-band moments than I appreciated then, though many of her best
live shots are Naomi on her own shooting action portraits of Joe
Baiza, or David Chandler, or Dez Cadena, or Curt Kirkwood, or D. Boon
or Henry Rollins. It was asking for trouble if I sent out shots of
any single member of a band because SST bands were bands, but she
would make prints and give them to the musicians.

Jack Brewer of Saccharine Trust recently wrote about Naomi:

"We hung out for a short while in the early days. But she was on to
me. And knew me too well to fall for my saccharine lines. She had
class. She loved the music and was very supportive of those who
worked at making the music. Whenever you look at an early Saccharine
Trust photo you will notice a gleam in my eyes, as I am not looking
at the camera. I am looking at Naomi. With love and a crush I never
got over... She really loved the music. As she documented it I think
she put a lot of faith and trust into the musician. Perhaps saw them
as noble. But she held herself up throughout. I hope no one hurt
her." (Jack Brewer, May 7, 2005)

Of course she did get hurt, it was that kind of time and place, but
SST was worth it, and a relatively safe place to be. Elsewhere in the
L.A. music world the drugs and alcohol and sex and egos ruled the art
and so the art wasn't worth the bother of the crappy clubs, the bad
PAs, the drunk assholes, the pedophiles and Los Angeles' endless
supply of sad, lost girls, and angry, restless boys. There was a
steady stream of quite young people in those years dropping dead from
drugs, and then suddenly from Aids as well. Paul Beahm/Bobby
Pyn/Darby Crash wrote in the Germs' tune, Manimal: "Evolution is a
process too slow to save my soul."

In Brendan Mullen's oral history of L.A. punk (more essential
reading), Trudie Arguelles, then a young scenemaker up from Palos
Verde describes the mid-seventies post-glitter/pre-punk Hollywood
scene at Rodney's English Disco:

"We knew it wasn't the heyday,... 'cause we didn't see Iggy or Bowie
anywhere. Then we met Rodney (Bingenheimer) and Kim Fowley - any girl
that walked in there met them immediately. We also met all these
trashy Hollywood kids from broken families, runaways or kids from
abused homes... a real sleazy kind of a scene... some of them were
really young... and we fit in somehow." (We Got the Neutron Bomb,
Three Rivers)

Though some in the South Bay destroyed themselves it was generally a
healthier, more purposeful scene. Even the violence coming north from
Huntington Beach was pretty straightforward compared to the
sociopathic viciousness on display in Hollywood where it seemed the
tone was set by show-biz pedophiles chasing young faghags-in-denial
chasing reluctant homosexuals back into their closets. I like Jack
Grisham's construction - he was the singer in Vicious Circle/TSOL and
chief apostle of punk violence:

"There were a lot of punkers already hangin' around the South Bay, a
bunch of 'em hung around the Black Flag guys, but they weren't fight
club dudes at all, they were real nice, real swell guys... they were
those peaceful SST types, intellectual punkers who read books and had
good political ideas... they were artistic pencil necks to the max.
To them it was all about the music and recording... Not like us
fuck-ups.... The one measly ethic we were able to scrape up between
the four of us in Vicious Circle was that we didn't believe in
punk-on-punk violence.... I always respected the old Hollywood
punkers. They were real sweet people who went through a lot to make
it happen for us fuck-holes in Orange County." (Ibid.)

In L.A., then, you had your choice: physical assault, or mind-fuck.
Maybe the worst that can be said of SST at the south bay center of
Los Angeles cosmology was that it was the best of both worlds. In any
case, Greg made sure that at SST art ruled... everything: psychology,
economics, biology, physics... you name it. Get in the Van includes
Henry's tour journals (originally published without photos as
Hallucinations of Grandeur, 2.13.61); it is the only account to date
from inside Black Flag. Henry as the voice of the band seemed to need
silence off-stage, so he wrote in his journal. I recall hearing that
on one tour it was contagious and they'd all be writing in their
journals before and after gigs - Mugger wasn't on that tour! Read
Henry's book and then James Parker's Turned On (Cooper Square) for
details on how we contravened Freud, Smith, Darwin, Newton, Ford and
one or two other double-domes. (Dave Markey's unreleased documentary
on the final Black Flag tour is titled, "Reality 86'd.")

Naomi lived with her parents and worked as hostess and bookkeeper at
the Black Angus restaurant in Northridge. I often called her there
and heard how her voice's professional "warmth" would shift into the
genuine personal warmth we all knew. Once Davo drove us up to some
gig at Godzilla's and we stopped at the restaurant to pick up some
prints; it was a signal moment seeing the sweetest goth girl you ever
saw there at her counter in the straight world break into a smile as
two of the least likely customers walked in the door. She was an
important part of our grand, long-shot, cultural conspiracy and she
loved it as we did. (Also working at the restaurant was Duff McKagan
and Naomi taxied proto-Guns 'n Roses lineups around town for a
period, and later if the straights couldn't be impressed with SST
stories she could tell them that Axl had thrown up in her car. She
also apparently had Metallica and Nirvana stories to tell - the
platinum trifecta!)

Naomi was getting known and had been flown to Chicago to shoot the
Effigies, and Naked Raygun, and had visited D.C. and shot bands there
already. Ray Farrell had come down to SST by 85 from San Francisco
where he'd worked for Down Home, Rough Trade, Subterranean and
others. Ray is a true music guy, as well as a stable character and
was probably more useful personally to Naomi than I was. (In the year
Ray delayed coming we had rock writer Byron Coley come in weekly to
feed us and log the playlists.) I left SST in 1986 and Naomi was by
then living in Redondo Beach and was soon working at SST in Long
Beach. (SST was no longer moving every year due to the cops, but a
kind of mini-success was forcing it to find larger and larger
office/warehouse spaces.) The business end of the label was
functioning well for the first time, though still under the weight of
the legal bills, plus now distributor bankruptcies - Systematic, Jem,
and others. Naomi made money for each album cover and each
promotional shot as well as her wage. By the time SST opened up and
signed bands outside its immediate circle like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur
Jr., Screaming Trees, etc., getting shot by Naomi on trips to LA was
a virtual ritual element of being on the label.

I moved back to Chicago in July 86 and bought a four-flat and worked
on it and my book, Rock and the Pop Narcotic (Redoubt). Four of her
shots are in it and a number of bands are included in the book due to
her input; I counted on her to help me parse all those damn Dischord
bands as well as the Wino-damaged metal bands in Maryland (Wino:
Scott Weinrich of the Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan, The
Hidden Hand). When Black Flag broke up after the 86 tour, SST came
again under the day-to-day control of Greg and the workload increased
to epic, insane proportions. My replacement as production manager,
Rich Ford, had to quit playing guitar in Chuck's band Swa or anywhere
else as he quickly became the most experienced production manager in
the history of the record industry; SST was releasing more records
than any two major labels combined in this period, and this in the
era of the three format release - LP, cassette, CD! I hope Rich is
okay.

I would talk to Naomi by phone and we wrote each other. She writes
twice in late 87/8 that she was trying to cut her SST hours down to
50 a week! Brave girl. Naomi was preparing a move to Washington, D.C.
for years it seemed. One letter is written at the end of an 1112 hour
shift at SST, another at 3:53am before turning in. In another she
complains of putting in 126 hours on her last two-week SST paystub,
though her solution is to add a part-time restaurant job to break up
the monotony! These restaurant jobs were important to her; I've seen
dozens of snapshots of her at their Halloween parties or her
going-away parties (complete with "We'll Miss You Naomi" banners on
the walls). They all look like such nice normal people and it seems
clear that Naomi was always the star of the staff.

She was no longer having much fun at SST and was going out to shows
less. She wrote that working with Ray Farrell was the only thing
keeping her there. Then SST fired him. So Naomi left. Mugger was soon
gone as well. Jordan too. Ultimately even Chuck - gone! (A wild
guess: No farewell parties...) Naomi had friends at Dischord Records
and she was looking forward to getting out of Los Angeles. To the
extent I still worried about Naomi, I worried less thinking she would
be in Jeff Nelson and Ian MacKaye's orbit. (She wrote that Chuck and
Mugger were paranoid about her going to work at Dischord with all she
knew, but she was actually going to the reggae label, Ras Records.
Ras was going to release a record by her friends, Scream, then
managed by Glen Friedman who was now in New York shooting hiphop.)

Naomi's letters also reveal her insight on the music of this or that
band at a particular stage in their evolution. (How many folks on
earth besides Naomi understood just how incredible Baiza's second
band, Universal Congress of, had suddenly gotten? Or how the Tar
Babies records didn't quite prepare you for what they put out live?)
I found such musical sophistication, as opposed to mere stylistic
handicapping, to be common only around SST.

It shouldn't surprise that the girls at and around SST were also far
hipper than the music professionals of the nation; it's our loss that
they are not asked or will not answer and so are un-represented in
the articles, books and films coming out. The Minutemen documentary,
We Jam Econo, really only features Nan, Mike's then girlfriend, and
Kira, in amongst all us aging rock guys, when I can think of at least
ten girls that should be in there on camera for all the Minutemen
gigs they saw, all the bowls they smoked with them, not to mention
all the miscellaneous whathaveyou... One night after Saccharine Trust
at the Anti-Club, I found myself standing with three of the hippest -
Kelley, Theresa, and Rosetta - as I put away my recorder. Naomi
stepped over as she capped her camera lens and Kelley said, "Look,
Carducci, all your followers are here!" I don't think I blushed, but
I pressed them on whether they were willing to kill for me, and they
each eagerly swore that they were. (Daphna, you do not know how lucky
you were.) These women have a few stories, I'm guessing. Hope the
rest are doing okay.

There have been great Kira Roessler (Black Flag, Dos) interviews
lately in Citizine, and Razorcake fanzines. Razorcake also tracked
down Alice Velasquez (the Bags) for an amazing debriefing on how an
immigrant's daughter who spoke no English until grade school sailed
off into the Hollywood punk scene (see also the Alice Bag Band
performance in The Decline film). In a 2002 memoir titled, Coloring
Outside the Lines (Rowdy's), Aimee Cooper adds to the barren shelf of
female testimony. She worked at Slash and was a resident of TC house
in L.A., which was a crashpad for young Germs insiders "orphaned" by
Darby Crash's suicide, and a way-station for Black Flag between the
last Torrance SST and the Unicorn SST in West Hollywood. It's also
where Black Flag found their drummer for 1982, Emil McKown. Aimee
opens her book by describing her disappointment at seeing the Rolling
Stones from a distance at an outdoor concert in California (likely
the same Anaheim show that Chris took Naomi to), and then later her
thrill on seeing Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers in a virtually
empty club in the Village. Also, We Got the Neutron Bomb, features
dozens of amazing female voices and Brendan tells me that Naomi was
on his list but he couldn't find her. The photographer Jenny Lens
also writes that she was deputized to find Naomi for the We Jam Econo
filmmakers and couldn't.

Here's a bit from Naomi's first letter to me after her move east;
it's written on Ras Records stationery:

"Well, I've finally made the big move. I'm living in Arlington, VA
and am workin' here at Ras. So far things have been goin' pretty good
- I've been here 16 days now & have been working here a week.... I
was able to meet up with Ray on his way back from Russia while he was
at Blast First in NY. We met up in Hoboken for the Screaming Trees
show then we all drove down to DC for their show here & then they
took off back to NYC. The house I'm living at is pretty cool - it's
pretty big and the best thing about it is the owner is letting me
take a big part of the garage to use as a darkroom which is great.
I've been doin' quite a few pix since coming out - I've been doing
more photos & going to more gigs in these past 2 weeks than I had in
LA for the past 4 or 5 months - nice to be productive again. fIREHOSE
were here about 10 days ago - really good to see them again - they
didn't know that I had moved so it was a fun surprise.... Last night
I went and saw Fugazi, Butterglove, Alter Natives and Burma Jam down
in Richmond all of whom were really good. Gwar asked me to do photos
of them this Fri. when they come to DC - should be interesting."
(Naomi Petersen, May 1, 1989)

Note her listing of each band on the Richmond bill - this level of
generous interest is unusual and bands appreciated it. Soon after, on
the phone Naomi was almost helpless with laughter as she described
applying shoe polish to the sides of Mike Watt's head before that
Firehose gig. She said Mike bemoaned his first gray hairs as his "old
man gray wings." In another call she told me of being the object of
some touring musician's drunken obsession. Said musician, part of
D.O.A. mk 2 or 3, thinking she had retired to her bedroom with some
other dude, pounded on the door and finally broke it down in a
jealous rage. She had instead gone out with friends. I pleaded with
her, "Naomi, have mercy on those knuckleheads!" She laughed and
laughed.

I would hear things when old musician friends like Cris Kirkwood,
Scott Weinrich, Mike Webber, or Bruce Calderwood seemed to be
flirting with death, but they made it through their rough spots.
Reggie Rector didn't make it through his drug problems; perhaps as an
Angeleno (Long Beach) he was just too acclimated to the streets. I
called Jack Brewer from Chicago once and interrupted his
reconciliation with Reggie, who had ripped him off for drug money
(see Jack's song, "Reggie's Plateau"); I had him put Reggie on the
phone so I could tell him how good he was and to keep it together and
that I was including a Naomi shot of his band, Secret Hate, in my
book. He was one of the best guitar players in L.A. (put him in NYC
and he blows the Black Rock Coalition to New Jersey) - then suddenly
shot dead on the streets of Long Beach.

I never heard anything like these stories about Naomi. My concern for
her had always been about whether any musician could ever commit to
her, and in truth whether she could commit back. I suspected her
father was the only man who could ever cause her to despair, and I
trusted that that would never happen again. And the east coast move
and her frequent trips to Europe had rejuvenated her. In Europe she'd
write from Germany, France, and Italy. She shot touring American
bands there and went off to shoot historical sites of interest to
her; I've seen impressive color shots she took at Auschwitz - pink
winter sunsets over the empty, barbed wire-enclosed yards.

Only once on the phone did she seem the slightest bit upset. She
called me in early summer 1993 after having gone out for her first
and only time as a tour manager - she had booked the tour as well. It
was a Saint Vitus/Internal Void tour of the east coast. Great music
of course, a legendary tour even, but a disaster as well. This is
from a Blood Farmers interview online, they opened one of the shows:

"Eli: That tour was hilarious, but very sad at the same time. We
spent a long weekend with them. Thursday night we did a gig at this
club in Jersey... I think everybody split $20 or something. We were
living in a three-bedroom apartment with our friend Lew and his
girlfriend and both bands and the crew stayed at our apartment.
Something like 16 people! Some army of tough-looking badasses they
were. Me and Dave (Blood Farmers) were just these skinny kids who
loved metal. They WERE metal. That weekend Dave and I went with them
when they had two gigs on the Jersey shore which each had their own
little tragedies. The Saturday night gig... had some sort of screwing
of Vitus that I don't remember and they were so pissed they only
played three songs. The next day was a matinee gig at another dive...
I remember JD (from Void) getting into some kind of beef with the
management over something (I think it was about drinking). After they
played, the wonderful Naomi Petersen clogged up the sink in the
ladies room and left the water running and some fat jerk came outside
with a pit bull and was threatening to set it loose on us. He was
wearing a shirt that said, 'Increase the peace.'" (Eli Brown,
Leafhound.com)

Eli had only seen Naomi over the course of those couple days and yet
was still struck by her ten years later. She was a grace note in a
hard rock world, albeit one that wasn't going to let some scumbag rip
off her bands without a protest. This night it would be the New
Jersey cops that folded before Naomi; according to Chandler she soon
had them shrugging off the complaint and instead telling her Bruce
Springsteen stories! I can just picture her feigned, yet warm,
enthusiastic interest.

She was something of a legend herself as stories of SST just loomed
larger once Black Flag was gone and Nirvana's breakthrough seemed to
allow that it had all amounted to something in pop music terms. In
those years SST seemed even to be clothing the musicians of America.
I saw Soundgarden at the Cubby Bear and two of them were wearing
Saint Vitus shirts, and in many of Naomi's later shots players are
wearing the shirts of other SST bands. Naomi must've cut some figure
on the east coast, as unassuming and unpretentious as she was. There
are scattered, admiring references to her on the web (often with her
last name misspelled), and I'm guessing there were more than a few
songs written about her if one could only crack the code. I noticed
as I was leaving SST that she was maturing into quite a beautiful
woman. I hope she got to overhear people in the know whispering to
each other, "Dude, that's Naomi Petersen!" Having seen her they could
rest assured that they were where it was at.

But this time on the phone she got audibly drunk as we talked. I
remember the one time I ever saw her with a beer in hand instead of
her camera because it was so unusual. It was at the Anti-Club in 84
and she was perhaps sitting out some loser band, but I had to smile
and comment on it - she held the bottle in both hands like it was a
small brown bird (she was still underage). Now though, she seemed
most upset that she had had a falling out with her friends in Saint
Vitus. As she drunkenly told it, at some point when the tour had gone
terminally wrong she'd been called a fucking Jap. I know the guys in
Saint Vitus well and they are not badasses; they are sweet, earnest
dudes unless you try to fuck with their sound. I believe rather that
she was called a fucking bitch - hey, there's a big difference in
this case! Naomi was not frail, but it hurt her that she had
volunteered to help her friends string together some gigs and then
have it fail and be blamed. Naomi knew the world was often harsh for
her musician friends, but she generally operated outside the gory
details. Her small lie tells me that she'd been deeply wounded by
those damn Simi girls, and alcohol just encouraged her to poke this
wound. I think she was trying to impress upon me the scale of the
betrayal she felt by plugging it into the most painful memories she
had.

Naomi had had her fill of Simi Valley and the eternal now of Los
Angeles. She loved that history was visible and accessible around the
D.C. area and in Europe. She wrote how she envied Ray Farrell's trip
to Moscow with Sonic Youth, and looked forward to going to Australia,
and one day moving to Germany, but all this interest seemed to stop
at Japan. She shared an aesthetic interest in fascist regalia with
Jeff Nelson, but his interest ranged as well to Japan and he noticed
that Naomi seemed to have zero interest in anything to do with her
birthplace. (Odd, that in dyeing her hair black she made herself look
more purely Japanese, which I suppose argues that punk style did do
for Naomi what she required of it.) Remember that she remained a
citizen of Japan, for all her disinterest. She wrote me from the east
coast,

"I also may start a waitressing job at Benihana's which I think is
kinda funny. Can't quite picture it myself but they asked me (I had
applied as a cashier)... so I guess I'll give it a shot."

Can't picture it, Naomi?! And here she goes again, loading up
work-hours...

In any case I did not remark that night in 1993 on her increasing
slurring of words over the course of the call, but instead assured
her that no-one in Saint Vitus, or on earth, hated her and insisted
that she stay out of that end of the music business. I wish I had
that call back because I know she wanted something more from me, a
pure sympathy that didn't involve making excuses for anyone else. She
had revealed her problem to me, but thinking it pegged to a specific
disappointment I missed it. I should have called her the next day. I
invited her to Chicago, several times, but she never came, and then I
moved to Wyoming, where nobody ever goes.

Perhaps this disappointment forced her to rethink some things. In
1994 Naomi traveled with her family to Japan for a family reunion.
And she went back a second time with just her mother. What must the
Kashimura family, practicing Buddhists all, have made of this
willful, flamboyant American daughter of the Japanese girl who took a
flyer on the American she loved? My guess is they were flattered by
the interest of their exotic American relation. However, while in
Japan her mother's obsessive concern that Naomi disguise that she was
left-handed so as to avoid such loss of face as to be unimaginable,
certainly brought home to Naomi just how much a gaijin she was.

Jack Brewer saw Naomi in 95/6 and she had just come out of the
hospital (probably her recurring kidney infection) and looked thinner
but otherwise fine - in fact, "hot" was his word. Chuck Dukowski saw
her in the late nineties and also didn't pick up on any trouble she
might be having. Dave Chandler doesn't remember seeing her drink
anything harder than beer.

In her thirties Naomi seemed to be losing interest or faith in music
and musicians. Farrell tells me she wanted to cut her ties to the
music scene, especially the men. I'd like to think I wasn't one of
those men, but I was. I last called her in 97 from Laramie; Drag City
was reissuing the Nig-Heist album and was looking for photos. Naomi
told me those negatives were lost and she seemed disinterested and I
felt busted, calling only when I needed something from Naomi the
photographer. I thought of her again a few years later when Bill
Stevenson and I were brainstorming about what adult we might hire to
run our record label; we tried instead to make do with some kids, and
lets just say they don't make them like they used to. We went through
four regimes in six years. No-one slept on the office floor. No-one
approached working fifty hour weeks. And the kids in contemporary
audiences couldn't take in the music our bands played; it was too
good, too musical, too much to process.

Gary Himelfarb of Ras Records had hired her to do his accounts. She
shot very few reggae artists; I think the music didn't draw her to
those gigs. Naomi liked urgency and edge in her music. Also in a
letter she remarked on the sexism of the Rastas. She went to Jamaica
once, though, to help Gary put on a Ras music festival. She also did
accounts at the 9:30 club in Washington for a time.

Naomi met a non-musician who had his office near Ras. He was a
plumber named John Harper who worked for his father's company. She
married him and worked at their office. It might have looked as if
she'd gotten off the rock and roll merry-go-round in time to make a
family for herself. But Jeff and others would still get calls from
her and though she would deny she was drinking they suspected she
was. She complained about her husband. Scott Weinrich had known Naomi
since his stint with Saint Vitus in L.A. But even this badass, with
his own struggle to keep his life and music together, would make time
for Naomi. He was quite ready to go down there and beat him up if she
wanted it done, but at the offer she would pull back. Her husband
smoked pot but was not a drinker and became one more person to hide
her drinking from.

Gary offered to hire her again part-time but then he saw her drunk in
daylight hours and it made him wonder what he was thinking. Jeff saw
her last when she was three hours late meeting him. She was virtually
passed out on her feet, though she managed to laugh at his now
balding head. He took her to a hospital where she was told another
drunk like that might kill her. And yet Naomi still had her moments;
Chris Bopst of Alter-Natives (now doing radio) remembers,

"The last time I saw her was probably 3 or so years ago [01?] and she
seemed just like her old self. No drugs and very little, if any,
drinking. She was in good spirits and we talked about her managing, I
think this is correct, Saint Vitus? Everything seemed good with her
and we rocked out to, "Neat, Neat, Neat" by the Damned. She loved the
Damned...." (Chris Bopst, May 8, 2005)

After the hospitalization (for extremely low blood pressure and near
liver failure) Naomi checked into a treatment center in Virginia,
then graduated to a half-way house. But her regular lapses (generally
the downing of most of a bottle of vodka) began to keep her from
working. Her mother and brother moved her back to Shell Beach,
California, where she considered divorce and attended AA meetings.
Chris writes that she was on prescription drugs to shore up her
weakened condition, but he believes that being back home again, "made
her feel emotionally weak... like she was a teenager again with rules
and constant supervision."

And she was not using her camera in this period, which is no small
thing for Naomi. Over and over in her letters she frets about whether
she is being productive enough with her camera or her drawing. Naomi
was driven, but she was not particularly ambitious about her work
once done. She never made her own connections with the print media as
Glen Friedman or Ed Colver had. She never fretted much over who was
ripping off her images or misspelling her name. She apparently never
gave an interview to any fanzine, never was profiled anywhere...

Dave Chandler talked to her in Spring 03 to invite her to their
Chicago tune-up for their Weinrich-era Saint Vitus reunion in Europe.
(He invited me too; would that we had both gone.) Dave said Naomi
sounded her usual self but she wasn't working so didn't have the
money to come; she also mentioned she'd had a hysterectomy and was
going in for a mammography. She was 38.

Men buzz around as hardly more than hairy boys until the hand of fate
squashes them in their tracks like bugs. Women's lives are demarcated
by a series of traumatic, usually bloody, rehearsals for death: the
death of the little girl at menses, the death of the nymph at the
loss of virginity, the death of the single girl at marriage, the
death of the bride at the birth of the mother, the death of the
mother at menopause. On occasion, under these pressures they add some
bloodletting of their own. The above photo of Naomi from New Year's
Eve 1992 comes courtesy of David Chandler. Looking at this photo,
looking into those eyes, you can see that she respects the camera and
its ability to reveal truth. And so she looks a bit wary for it being
New Year's. There was plenty that she knew but would not tell and
here I think Naomi feels it best to close her mouth tighter because
the damn camera has turned on her and just might compel verbal truth
from her as well. I sure hope that she was right about these things
she knew. Some time after this photo her health began to fail. Her
best friends, the musicians, could often barely save themselves from
the inchoate demands of their cruel muse; most were playing music
less frequently or had moved onto more dependable gigs to support a
wife and kids. The girls she knew had moved beyond their music scene
pasts.

Our modern American life comes tagged with conceits like
individualism, feminism, self-actualization, etc., but in truth we
are simply loosed to our own devices; here's your birth control, you
already have your free will. The world outside the door is harsh on
even the best of families, and nowhere harsher than in the Los
Angeles of that day. From 1960 to 1973 youth culture bohemia was
idealistic and still believed its way past the gathering dangers;
thereafter bohemia believed in very little but art and sex and
destruction, and things got much darker - dangers were embraced (the
ubiquitous Charles Manson and the True Crime hit parade). And there's
no place where the early delusions died harder than Los Angeles.

When I first moved to Hollywood in Fall 1976 I was amazed at how
grimy and grim this sunny, palm-lined place was. Visibility was about
five blocks and the sun cooked the haze until it stung your eyes.
Pan-handlers stumbled along Hollywood Blvd with barely enough energy
to importune you. Energy came from the kids and the immigrants.
Armenians and Filipinos raised their kids in cheap apartments right
off the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which the skate-kids loved for its
smooth, seamless surface. Burnt-out Bowie, Bad Company and Aerosmith
could be heard coming from the last head shop on the Boulevard. But
Los Angeles would be the only place in America where the original
underground impetus was forced overground intact. Everywhere else the
urban underground was reflexively self-quarantining against the kids
in the suburbs until opportunities to get signed and get airplay
presented themselves. The resulting laundering via the major labels
sidetracked that music safely into college alt-rock, something
entirely overground in cultural terms if not always in sales terms -
those suburbs decided that. But in Los Angeles you had a
suburban-looking wonderland of accessible urban attractions, and
lower level industry entrepreneurs trying to ride street culture up
into media careers, as well as an ambitious, demanding population of
recent arrivals looking restlessly for something new and improved. I
had also lived in Chicago, Denver, Portland, and Berkeley through the
seventies and I was thrilled to get back to L.A. in 81, where real
things were possible.

It was all an exciting instability, an enervating high but it served
boys' interests which are obvious and lasting, more than women's
which are immutable and clocked in. Judging by behavior and art today
it seems to me that men are regressing (boys in fact rarely reach
manhood), while women are still evolving under the pressures of new
responsibilities and opportunities. The central tension today is that
women and girls outside the home depend increasingly on a civil order
that seems under siege from boy culture. I think of Naomi as a
transition figure. To an extent all women are transition figures
which is why we open doors for them, but the arts they now inhabit in
greater numbers are no longer the dangerous, drop-out wilderness they
were when young Naomi pulled that door open for herself. Things have
gotten quite safe. Girls don't drop out; they intern their way in
groups into the music industry for credit in American Studies
programs. They network. Art is something to manipulate at arm's
length, not to live, not to get on you. All of this safety, well
camouflaged by tattoos, piercings, porn vamping, suicide kitsch...

When Naomi came into SST bleeding all those years ago, she was
devastated by her father's anger. But she did not want to die. She
wanted to live. Naomi confided in her brother that from an early age
when asleep she dreamt a recurring dream of her own death. She
believed this dream. She was certain she would not live to be forty.
She considered herself too impatient to ever have children. Such
certainties determined how she lived, and made of her a kind of
nihilist. Against my memory of her considerate, humane female manner
such personal nihilism is something to contemplate indeed... I did
not really know her then. And her marriage was an attempt at
retirement. Her biological clock was rather a doomsday clock. She
wanted to live but knew she would die. I suppose the brain knows its
body and she accepted what it whispered to her as she slept. With
time short she apparently began to depend on alcohol in high school
to steel her resolution to get where she needed to go. She had no
time to waste, and she did not want to sleep alone.

In 1990 when she finally did move to Washington she wrote that her
father had driven her there over the course of four days. He had been
his daughter's artistic mentor, and had warned her she would never
make any money photographing bands and who can blame him now for
thinking punk rock killed his daughter? Mr. Petersen must think back
often on those long days on the road with his daughter. He certainly
hated leaving his bad girl on the east coast and returning home alone.

As it happened, Naomi Petersen the photographer, shot bands making
music in a period when rock and roll was an underground phenomenon,
1981 to 1994 or so. SST and others littered an uncaring media world
with her work to little effect. But those black and white prints sit
in the files of newspapers and magazines or, as publications go
digital and all-color, they trade on Ebay and wind up in the
collections of those who care about music history.

In her worst moments late in her life, Naomi, on the phone with Jeff
Nelson would threaten to destroy her negatives, an enormous mountain
of her work-effort at all those crowded, noisy gigs and later, alone
in the quiet of her darkroom. It might have sometimes seemed to her
that her musician friends valued her photos of them more than they
valued her. But she respected the cumulative historical value of her
work and the art that it was, above and beyond its personal meaning
to her, and so she was no nihilist. I wouldn't claim we were the most
dependable bunch of guys, and as there was no money for rock and roll
this time around, all interpersonal failings among us ground
pitilessly unlubricated by the good life accoutrements that people
picture going along with rock and roll. It's quite powerful to read
Henry's new edition of Get in the Van, wherein his original tour
journal entries re Kira stand in all their condensed, van-caged
hostility, but are now put into an appreciative, corrective context
in the 2004 afterword. Henry explains, "We were living hard in those
days and a lot was asked of us and we weren't always all that kind to
each other." (This edition is also the first publication to note
Naomi's passing.)

Henry as voice and face of Black Flag walked point for Greg but Greg
only fitfully watched his back; this was unforgivable. But Greg
walked point for all of us, as the liabilities piled up on his
shoulders and more of the best people money couldn't buy threw in
with him (now Chuck Biscuits, Troccoli, Whittaker, Ford, Linda, Kara,
Rat Sound, Bury, Cole, Markey, Revuelta, Martinez...), and we only
fitfully watched his back. This too was unforgivable. But, frankly,
none of us were going to make good soldiers. At best we were like the
fractious Wild Bunch caught at the close of the frontier. Our
frontier was the sixties cultural revolution and in retrospect the
Black Flag/SST story looks like a cultural analogue to the
Manson-Weathermen-S.L.A. endgame - art just had more life in it than
crime or politics. Pettibon knew this all then, of course, and
removed himself from it as much as possible - only it wasn't
possible, thank God. (He has a drawing where the caption reads, "The
friendly fire has made the sexual revolution a battle.")

Again, Greg was not a romantic, and I see more clearly now how
trapped he felt by the fact that "Black Flag" and "SST" meant so much
more to everyone around him than they did to him. Greg took them for
granted as simple by-products of his muse-chase. He came to music
only in his late teens, whereas the rest of us were steeped in the
disappointment that came with loving music and bands who could not
sustain our hyper-critical interest. We'd perhaps only dreamt some
band or label could ever be so potent and true as we took Black Flag
and SST to be. Greg often acted as if we had stolen them both from
him. He considered simply giving up the name Black Flag to Unicorn
and the courts and starting over. He may have been right but it
seemed unthinkable to most of us at the time. Needless to say no-one
could come up with a name half as good as Black Flag.

Within the band itself, the unspoken psychodrama compounded through
the full-time daily practice regimen, the no-money, no-food, no-sleep
privations on tour or in town. Yet each player in turn - Robo,
Dukowski, Stevenson, Kira - each had to be fired when they came up
short with Greg; they would stretch themselves mightily against their
very own playing natures hoping to comply and get to stay. They would
not quit. And they wept as they went out the door. The early conceit
of Black Flag was "We don't fire people; if they're into it, they'll
do it. If not let them go; don't try to convince them to stay." But
art is not like that, and things were no longer like the early days
when everyone was a beginner and Keith Morris or Ron Reyes might quit
on stage in a melodramatic huff. Now when Greg's musical demands grew
and he couldn't get someone he was unhappy with to quit, he was
violating that early code he and Chuck had devised; the year-long
firing of Chuck, then, was probably the most brutal thing I ever
witnessed that didn't involve bloodshed or lawyers. Today, Chuck
sounds fine; he leads a six-piece band - no guitar.

I didn't want to quit SST until Black Flag was done - they were why I
was there. I was bummed when upon first arriving I learned that
"Damaged" would go out through Unicorn-MCA (it was actually
distributed via Pickwick in the end) but decided to just hang and see
what developed. But Greg was down on me as early as late 83 when with
the expectation Unicorn would soon be out of the way we quietly
geared up for new Black Flag releases on SST. Greg did not think that
SST was good enough for Black Flag. He liked to think that I was
hanging around for the easier stuff, turning college radio hipsters
onto the Meat Puppets and Husker Du. I considered that an insult.
There was satisfaction to be had in turning the college radio sector
and then having smart college boys claim that they had made us! But I
had much more fun scheming to force-feed the world Black Flag,
Saccharine Trust or Saint Vitus, and getting SST's roiling aesthetic,
for all its unresolving motion, nevertheless fixed foremost in the
minds of people otherwise primed to ignore rock for pop. SST went
from improvising our way through the days to deal with the weekly
crises, to knowing what was coming six months on. Still I could not
be fired without being ripped off, and Greg did not do that to me.

There is perhaps a billion dollars at stake that keeps the Rolling
Stones LLC talking to each other. Perhaps in our case a billion
dollars would make no difference. Those are the breaks....

I think only Naomi could float over any and all of the burnt bridges
formerly connecting our little cohort of infamy. But I can't think of
any one of us who wouldn't trade those photos for that photographer.
She was essentially alone. She didn't walk point for the Riot Grrls,
or women generally. She seemed to have few female friends, and I
don't think she ever set up house with any guy until she retired into
her marriage. Her mission was a solo long-range recon patrol behind
enemy lines, or maybe "friendly" lines. Just about the worst mission
one could pull. She did not live like other people. I think she knew
her life was absurd and in her prime she enjoyed it immensely. Later,
she was transfixed and burning herself up. For groupies, just basking
in proximity to the display of rock and roll roosters seems enough,
as long as they're signed to a major label. Naomi, however,
identified strongly with the kind of existential, rejectionist shout
typical of the more serious hard rock forms. Its what she needed
musicians for. She seemed to share nothing of the style personally,
but felt it deeply nonetheless. When she made me cassettes of bands
she felt I should know, they would be of such heavy, resounding
dread-bombs as Unorthodox, Internal Void, and Dead World. She also
loved comedy in a way few women do; she shared this too with us all.

Pettibon draws a recurring character (taken from Felix the Cat) that
emits an enormous shout of "Va-Voom!" against the landscape. Raymond
explains, "He was usually misunderstood by the villagers... With
their common everyday speech it was hard for them to relate to such
an elementary voice... and by the end of the cartoon he would use his
voice to save the village." (Kunsthalle Bern catalog, 1995) In our
fallen, free nation this shout is absurd and cannot save the village.
Naomi knew her village, her family, was safe whatever lay ahead for
her. In the music Naomi favored, the absurd shout's importance was
that it maintained something like honor in the face of the
implacable, inhuman rotation of days, revolution of years, and the
hurtling through eternity... in the face of absurd Death. Something
like this is a conceit of many young artists as long as the body
seems to bounce back from anything, ready for more. Naomi was surely
frightened as her body began to hurt and fail, but she just wasn't
afraid enough.

However, Naomi, you did will yourself a photographer, the music
photographer of your era based on the evidence. None other produced
the deep coverage of bands high and low that you did on both coasts
and elsewhere, and with a noticeable lack of the lightweight,
industry foists that most other photographers and media people ran
to. Talking with Jeff Nelson I mentioned I would offer her family
money to strike new prints from her negatives so that in publishing a
collection we could be sure none of her best work would go unseen.
Jeff smiled at my naivete regarding the size of her negative cache;
he had seen it threatening to fill a bedroom. But of course, Naomi!
You were naturally, totally SST about your thing... I apologize for
even now underestimating you. It's a job for mother-fuckin' Paul
Allen!

This SST ethic, as it now seems to be called in the literature, was
likely sourced in the teenage interplay of brothers Greg Ginn and
Raymond Pettibon (Raymond adopted the nickname his father gave him,
whereas no-one but Mr. Ginn, and occasionally Mugger, ever called
Greg by his: Kierkegaard). The brothers haven't spoken to each other
in almost twenty years, not even at their father's recent funeral.
This silence is Greg's choice and not just for his brother, and it
shoots a peculiar energy through any conversation SST/Black Flag
veterans have with each other. This energy grounds any threatened
nostalgia in Tragedy - one more reason to thank Greg, I suppose. I
hope he's okay.

I walked into the Ginn house one afternoon in 83 and Raymond was in
his chair turning written ideas into a pile of new drawings and Mrs.
G commented to me in her Estonian accent, "Ray is really working hard
today." And Raymond - graduated UCLA in economics at 19 - shrugged
and said, "Demand." He even made himself laugh that time. There was
no demand but that we placed on ourselves.

I was not exactly the social director at SST; I saw the gigs, grabbed
the first ride back to the south bay and went to sleep so as to get
up early, get the papers read over coffee and get on with the task at
hand, and be free to shoot baskets by four, shower, and then, unless
Mr. Ginn, D. Boon, or Byron Coley had come by with food, walk to the
Ginns' to eat something. I was a writer waiting to mature surrounded
by people fully, dangerously committed to music as life. I did not
often know who did what with whom in the hours after the gigs. We
were in thrall to a kind of anarchist personal autonomy as well, and
this contributed to the burden of the girls who were there. And I did
not take the opportunity when I had it to ask Naomi about herself,
and press her on how she was doing. So it surprised me from May 2nd
on, how affected I was by the news Naomi had died, and that I had
only found out two years late by happenstance in an email from Tim
Adams of Ajax Records who did not know her. I heard about Mr. Ginn's
passing within two days from Troccoli via Henry. Was Naomi really so
completely forgotten? No... I found that out immediately as I in turn
spread the news with my questions. (When I wrote Mugger that Mr. Ginn
had died, he marveled at how good he'd been to us. A couple months
later I wrote him about Naomi. He took a week to respond: "I keep
thinking about her, and that I was not that kind to her." That word
again.) Should I have pushed her and her camera out the door back in
82, instead of pulling her more deeply into the music world? Might
she have finished school, gone on to college, married, taken pictures
only of her kids? No... Afraid not. Naomi knew what she was doing,
and her father surely had tried everything before he tried the tough
love that sent her crash-landing at SST that night all those years
ago.

When D. Boon died in a van rollover just before Christmas 85 it was
just a month after the death by cancer of my sister Lisa. D. was one
of the few at SST who knew; he'd lost his mother to cancer and so was
sensitive to it. When she was about ten Lisa began to grind her teeth
in her sleep; the one time I heard it in the middle of the night it
sounded so loud as to be superhuman. She could never have produced
that sound while awake. I didn't encourage my sisters to get
interested in punk rock (to say the least!), though Lisa stayed with
me in Berkeley for a few months in 81 while deciding whether to
finish her B.A. in dance, and saw Black Flag, the Meat Puppets, the
Dead Kennedys and others. Lisa's death spurred me to wrap it up at
SST. After Christmas 85 Mr. Ginn picked me up at the Long Beach
airport and asked me if I was back for the funeral. I laughed,
thinking he meant the long-threatened grand SST inhumation when we
would all - Black Flag, all ex-members, all suspected future members,
the SST and Global crews, the SST bands, the New Alliance bands, Rat
Sound, the kids on the mailing list, the entire Ginn clan, every band
Greg ever signed, Spot ever recorded, Naomi ever shot, and all the
girls who ever sucked or fucked or winked and walked away - every
last one of us pushed into a gargantuan hole in the earth and filled
in by bulldozers driven by Jan Wenner and Darryl Gates - silenced
once and for all. I thought Regis meant that funeral! Mugger hadn't
wanted to tell me about D. over the phone. But as good a friend as D.
was - I still remember his phone number - I felt nothing after what
I'd just been through with family. I felt for Jeannine, his
sister-in-law, our mail order department, now wheel-chair bound, and
D.'s Linda, because I could see them and the challenges ahead for
them. But I was left wondering what I really made of these friends or
associates or enemies.

I did not charge Naomi a toll back then, which would've been the
normal rec-biz practice. An empty gesture, but I hoped she
appreciated it. But for throwing in and doing that work under those
circumstances I hope to help see her material published in the way it
deserves for both its artistic and historical value. With our
run-and-gun m.o. at SST we could not afford an art department per se,
and doing records fast to hit stores before the tours did not allow
do-overs when I or the coke-heads at Quadra-color (nice guys all!)
fucked it up. Naomi's art might have been better served; I owe her
for that.

In Shell Beach, Naomi considered a divorce but her husband dissuaded
her; the family feels she represented a coming insurance payoff to
him now. And Naomi would not, could not stay clean for longer than
three weeks. They purge you from the national waiting list for a
liver transplant for that, the bastards... She perhaps appreciated
the advice and encouragement she got from family and friends like
Jeff and Henry as she would a warm breeze, but otherwise ignored it.
She walked away from one head-on collision and other sleep-deprived,
alcohol-related car accidents. Her brother Chris writes,

"Naomi was a very independent person as you probably know, so it was
difficult for her to accept the help that was offered to her. It was
hard for us to see her destroy herself like that, but she always had
that wry sense of humor and loved to laugh at everything around her,
no matter how bad it got."

(Christopher Petersen, June 28, 2005)

Brave girl...

Naomi, in this year back home, was reminded what a master artist her
father had become and she was more interested in the personal and
professional inspiration he found as a young man in Japan. She asked
him to make her a pot. He made her the beautiful porcelain pot
pictured below.

She then, against her family's wishes, returned to Washington to try
to reconcile with her husband. She called her brother on Thursday,
June 12 from her hotel room in Maryland. It had gone badly and she
drank. She was to fly back home in two days but this was the night
the alcohol, perhaps in combination with her prescription drug
regimen, was finally too much for her. Room service found her the
next day. Her brother says Naomi's ashes fit perfectly into this pot
her father had made for her. Small white crosses line the top, and
the bottom reads, "With love to my daughter" and is signed and dated.
They are buried in the Simi Valley cemetery. Naomi hated Simi Valley.

On my recent pass through Los Angeles Pettibon told me that Medea had
called the house for Greg some twenty-three years after she last
barged into SST with her hustler boyfriend demanding song royalties.
She had been making threats so Chuck left Spot his gun before Black
Flag went on tour. Of all the punk era casualties Medea was the last
anyone expected to still be among the living. But her street skills,
the way she looked into men one after another and improvised her way
across the cityscape had kept her alive against the longest odds Los
Angeles can throw in front of a girl. A few days later, on my way
back to Wyoming I met Chris Petersen at a casino in Las Vegas to talk
about his sister and her determined trajectory against similarly long
but opposing odds. I would have lost both bets. Medea with her
nightmare childhood... Naomi with her loving family...

In addition to the better-known bands that Naomi shot, dozens,
hundreds of these now dead bands are secrets still. When the German
or Japanese reissues or the wireless ring-tone file-sharing whatever
allows their rediscovery by some future kids dropping out of their
over-produced, over-sold pop hell, they will find this music as clean
and pure as field recordings. And they will find that more images of
these bands are credited to one Naomi Petersen than to any other
photographer, by miles and miles. It might be possible to chronicle
eighties music in America by knitting together the regional work of a
dozen photographers, but no single photographer's work would need
less augmenting than Naomi's, and her chronicle would include so many
excellent, unheralded, otherwise unwitnessed bands that hers alone is
indispensable.

This music, rediscovered, will be heard by more people than were
there, just as was true of blues, rockabilly, surf, garage,
psychedelia, etc. And then the musicians will be seen as they were in
those moments through the lens of Naomi's Nikon, through her American
eyes. An appropriate action-epitaph for this music-loving,
history-obsessed, death-haunted, boy-crazy, insomniac, workaholic,
absurdist, auburn-haired halfie girl - granddaughter of a Buddhist
priest - born in Tokyo, raised in Los Angeles... One of us.

Postscript - In those years I would record gigs on a small tape
recorder. Occasionally I listen to these old rough-sounding cassettes
and it always startles to suddenly hear myself addressed out of the
noise by the voices of Greg, or Mugger, or Laurie, or Naomi... It
really did happen and it was a privilege to be involved... If
Santayana is right that those who forget the past are doomed to
repeat it then I'd gladly erase the tapes, smash the records, burn
the photos and forget all about everyone and everything so as to
insure meeting them again and doing it all over. It was some serious
fun. But Santayana belongs to the era of heroic national missions and
their concomitant bodycounts. Fukuyama says history has ended, and
that feels more true. It sure seems as if that kind of insane
ambition in music and art has gone extinct as well.

Photos copyright Naomi Petersen estate, unless noted otherwise.

Under construction: http://www.naomipetersen.com

Photos of Naomi, plus her shots of Henry and Saccharine Tust are
presented here in high resolution for use only to illustrate any
story concerning Naomi. For any other use please write for
permission: in...@naomipetersen.com

Thanks to those who helped me with contacts, and those who responded
to questions and helped with photos, especially Chris Petersen, Jeff
Nelson, Dave Chandler, Spot, Jack Brewer, and Mugger.

pettibon: gumby represents an alter-ego for my work as an artist... gumby
is a kind of metaphor for how I work

in his own words...

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/pettibon/index.html

(check out the video at that link)

Gumby, Vavoom, & Baseball Players

ART:21: Are any of the characters in your work ever heroes? Say the
baseball players.

PETTIBON: I'm not in awe of what most people would consider heroes
which would be someone of stature and power. In fact those would tend
to be people who I don't respect at all. The public has a kind of
natural awe of them that tends to be a mixture of fear, control, and
violence. You could say the loss of innocence in baseball began with
the fixing of the games in 1919 with the Black Socks World Series
Scandal.

Players--they all can't live up to be a perfect model hero like Steve
Garvey who had an elementary school named after him. But, that
actually isn't a good example because he had some pretty major
scandals himself. But there's something about athletes and even horse
racing. Horses are athletes of sorts too. They can have a heroic
stature to me. People usually tend to value an extreme one thing or
another, whether it's the intellectual against the athletic. Like the
jocks never mix with artists or the people who are studying physics.
I admire both, but in a moral sense. I don't have any expectation for
anyone other than behaving decently to other people. That's really
not the true definition of a hero though.

The heroic has an epic scale to it. If you look at my baseball works,
for instance, there is a kind of larger than life attitude to a lot
of it. But then not all the works are a pure adulation of the ball
players. I mean they go into some pretty sordid avenues. My drawings
dwell on that subject quite often as well.

ART:21: You seem to like to mix the underbelly and the philosophy.

PETTIBON: Not always though. And not always in the same drawing. You
can look at a lot of my baseball drawings and they don't have that
kind of a resentment of most figures that you just automatically want
to take them down a notch. There's quite a few that aren't like that.

ART:21: How far back does your interest in baseball go?

PETTIBON: Baseball has probably been my favorite since I was a
child. Some of the others, like horse racing--that came in later--but
football, basketball, track and field... I'm not obsessed with any of
those. The reason why I keep coming back to certain images is
probably most often that there's a visual quality that works for me,
and that can be as simple as drawing horse races.

I think whether you are throwing the pitch or batting the ball, you
do have that sense of movement and for an artist like myself whose
work is about that one moment that can be a reason I do that. But
sports, and baseball in particular in America, there's a lot more to
it, there's a lot more nuances. Not just in the game itself--but
that's also important to. My work on the subject does tap into some
of the nuances of the game--the pitching of the baseball for
instance, or hitting a baseball--but also it says a lot about what
goes on off the field as well about the society in general. It's kind
of a microcosm of the society as a whole.

ART:21: It's rare that an artist gives equal attention to both words
and pictures. Could you have accomplished what you wanted as a writer?

PETTIBON: Yes, if I had to choose. But the point is I don't. I mean
I don't feel I'm diluting what I'm saying by doing them both. Im not
trespassing on one or the other. To me it's natural. I don't feel
cheated. But on the other hand, I spend a lot more time writing than
I do drawing. I really wouldn't want to make that distinction or feel
the need to separate the two or make excuses. The fact is I make work
that requires both except in rare, rare cases.

ART:21: Can we talk about the Gumby theme in your work?

PETTIBON: Gumby? To put it in general terms, you'll see in my work
this tendency to take on some very ridiculous subject. Possibly you
can look at it as being so far out there as to be kind of just a
stray thought. Going back to the heroic figures, you can speak about
a wider area of things that happen that puts the responsibility on
the shoulders of something like Gumby. It's not done in any sarcastic
way. It's not even meant to call attention to itself. All I'm really
asking is for you to look at that with the same kind of respect that
you would if it was some important historical figure or Greek statue.
Or the usual subject matters that artists tend to use.

There's also a reason why Gumby in particular works for me so well.
Because it does relate to the way I make work, which has very much to
do with words and reading in particular. Gumby is a kind of metaphor
for how I work. He actually goes into the book, goes into a biography
or historical book, and interacts with real figures from the past and
he becomes part of it. He brings it to another direction. And I tend
to do that in my work. That's why Gumby is a particularly important
figure to me. I have to give credit to the figure of Gumby himself
because it's not something that I'm raising up by his bootstraps and
putting in this high-art realm. Gumby's creator, Art Clokey, was a
pretty brilliant guy, and it wasn't like the original Gumby cartoons
weren't worth paying attention to and that I'm rescuing him from
Saturday morning children's cartoons.

ART:21: Is Gumby like an alter-ego?

PETTIBON: Gumby represents an alter-ego for my work as an artist. He
represents me as an alter-ego. There's actually a lot more to that
figure then just 98 ounces of clay or whatever. Art Clokey was into
Zen Buddhism and into a lot of pretty deep stuff for Saturday morning
cartoons. Clokey was a pretty hip figure in Los Angeles and in the
counter-culture of the '60s and the '50s. The beatniks and the
hippies. I have a lot of respect and affection for him. And for Pokey
as well, and Goo, Prikle, and even the Blockheads. One other thing
that I've never thought of, but that Gumby does for me in some of his
cartoons, is he goes into a biography or historical book and he
interacts with real figures from the past. George Washington, or
whatever. And I tend to do that in my work and in my videos as well.

ART:21: In some of the drawings Gumby is paired with a vast
landscape. It's like one guy against the world.

PETTIBON: But you know who does more for me than Gumby--Vavoom. When
I'm doing drawings of Vavoom I create a situation of putting him in
this epic, sublime, romantic landscape and he is this little guy with
a booming voice. It's a perspective that has this panoramic scope to
it.

ART:21: When did these characters become part of your self or your
repertoire?

PETTIBON: I don't know the exact way that works. Usually there's not
any forethought. I don't investigate and find the right character
that is going to express the way I want to do things. But it starts
inevitably with just one drawing. It resonates and it keeps going
from there. It snowballs into a persona that I keep going back to.
But there isn't any design to it. It establishes it's own kind of
momentum and I don't really have to consciously think about it

I get asked a lot on this subject--"Why is that character so
important to you?" and so forth. It's not something that I thought
was especially important the first time I did it. I may have drawn
certain subjects numbers of times but it doesn't mean that I'm to
this day obsessed with a character or dwell on it as the subject
matter. Or that I'm aching to get back to it as soon as possible. I
feel that an artist has so much to see and he just kind of works on.
And you could probably say the same thing for just about any subject
or profession, including, well, really anything.

Political Cartoons: Patty Hearst & the Presidents

ART:21: There's an anger and a kind of social criticism in your work?
Can you talk about that? Where does that anger come from?

PETTIBON: Well, it just wells up from deep inside me so watch out,
it's likely to blow any time! [LAUGHS]

I can't really say that it doesn't somewhat come from me, but my work
is a lot more impersonal than most people give it credit for. It's
not that I'm not angry, it's that it's not a really personal thing.
Well, I don't even know about that... I think when anything is worth
getting angry about you want to hold back and look at it from a
distance and without this emotion, if possible.

ART:21: Is the anger an undercurrent in the work?

PETTIBON: It's a mistake to assume about any of my work that it's my
own voice. Because that would be the most simple-minded ineffective
art that you can make. That would really be talking down to people,
and if I had such a burning need to express my opinions or whatever
then I don't think art would be where I'd want to do it. It's not a
good area for that. But when we're talking about the schools and
gangs and segregation and so forth, those are very obvious problems
and no one really needs my weighing in on it. But there's more
underlying problems or issues, and those will be the things I would
want to cover in my work.

And you know that's what I do all the time. There is a very direct
kind of anger in some of my work to figures like Ronald Reagan or J.
Edgar Hoover or whatever. You can have a million artists sign
petitions one side or another--and so what? You'd really have to go
back to the Greeks and the Romans and to the satire or the very
personal kind of rancor that they wrote about people of the day to
see what I'm doing. The pretentious, the powerful, the decadent and
the corrupt. It's not done from analyzing their positions and
correcting them or weighing in your own solutions, because it's not
the kind of form that works.

It's like when we were talking about heroes and I brought up that the
usual person who is considered a hero is really the opposite of what
I would consider. And it's a way of trying to break down this kind of
natural awe and respect that comes out of a fear or envy. There's
this built-in respect that shouldn't be there completely. I told you
how much I consider characters like Gumby with respect. And just on
the face of it anyone, I think, should compare cartoons to the
president of the United States. This one or anything of them really.
Those are the real cartoon figures and those are the real ridiculous
figures. I want to make works where someone like Gumby or Vavoom or
Felix the Cat or whatever comes out as someone to respect and to
listen to and you're glad you did when you're given that opportunity.

I've never considered myself much of a political artist. And most of
my art doesn't really deal in explicitly political issues. But I'm
not going to apologize or shy away from it any more than I would any
other subject. But there is no area where anyone is dealing with this
in the way I am--which is for once not to assume someone like the
President automatically has a claim on anyone's respect, to follow
him or to take him seriously. We don't see that at all because the
real pathetic thing is this generation of journalists. Not that it
was any better really that much before, but it is really incredible
today because they probably pat themselves on the back and say,
"Well, we're responsible journalists," and really they're just the
punks of the political establishment they cover. I'm not trying to
encourage art to become political. Just because you're artists
doesn't mean you should have a platform. When Hollywood figures or
artists decide to get on their platform, often that is going to do
much more harm.

ART:21: Anger and humor. It's a delicate line.

PETTIBON: I don't think humor is a bad thing at any time really, or
in these times. I make decisions all the time in my work that I won't
make fun of someone just for the sake of going for some cheap laugh.
I won't do that if it hurts someone who I would feel bad about. If
it's based on things that people have no control over. That should be
condemned for any reason. We as humans still so often times feel the
need to have someone to pick on who is different.

I don't think there is subject matter to consider too important to
use humor with. A lot of times, people wonder if any of this was
intended--you know, like humor is just by accident all the time and
maybe it's not a good thing to laugh, or maybe they're not getting
it, maybe they're seeing something in it that they shouldn't. But
that's not the case. I have no problems with my own attempts at humor.

ART:21: A recurring subject in your work is Patty Hearst and the SLA.
Can you talk about that in relation to your use of humor?

PETTIBON: Patty Hearst and the SLA would really be impossible not to
treat with some broad comic aspect to it because the SLA and the
whole situation was such a broad burlesque. A lot of the best humor,
whether it's the Three Stooges or Moliere, is about someone who is
really strident or pretentious. The SLA and a lot of political groups
from the '60s and '70s--to any time period--are so strident and
they're so full of their own righteousness for the moment. Inevitably
a year later, like in Patty's case, she went from being a debutante
to an urban guerilla and then back again where she married her own
bodyguard.

Any one from groups such as that who have gravitated to the other
extreme--such as the current radical right, the reigning power of
now, the neo-conservatives--that all comes from a very left wing
position. Almost all those guys were at one time the opposite. And so
it's hard to take that sort of thing seriously if you can see it from
any historical distance. If you look at the Hearst case from the
beginning to the end it's like the Keystone Cops. That can happen by
chance or by the kind of ideas behind it as well.

Humor doesn't trivialize the real consequences, the people that get
hurt, for instance. I'm not making light of that. If I'm going to be
condemned for broaching that subject from a comic angle, that is
completely absurd. I'm not a fan of the underground or the SLA.
Personally or their politics. But to demonize them in particular when
you had a war going on that was killing millions--the Vietnamese
people and all people who should be allowed to live--it's a way for
me to objectify the lines there. To even the playing field a little
bit rather than picking one enemy and demonizing them to basically
cover your own ass. It's a way of making nothing sacrosanct and above
comedy, and at the same time not taking away all their humanity by
completely objectifying a whole group of people in a way that makes
them totally disposable either. I'm not doing that with any of those
groups.

ART:21: Portraying people is always tricky. For instance, some
viewers might think the way you depict women is misogynist. How would
you respond to that?

PETTIBON: When you get asked something like that you almost expect
someone to be disingenuous about it. In my personal life, of course,
you can't read my mind... My work really isn't coming from a very
personal point so to psychoanalyze my work really isn't going to
reveal anything. But then again that becomes a very circular kind of
thing because you could say, "Well, maybe it's hidden under the
surface and he just doesn't realize it," or whatever. But
specifically, like with Gumby, I never had a doll phase or an action
figure phase and certainly not now. So that wasn't an obsession for
me or a very personal thing. It came out of a certain subject matter
used in a certain way. I think a lot of the work that would be
considered misogynist comes from a strain in my work that is usually
described as a film noir type. Most of my work that would be
considered the most misogynist would be work where the women
character is like a caricature in comic books, like the Dragon Lady
in Melton Kaniff, or a girl usually named Velma or Velvalee or
whatever.

I've been asked a few times of my work that all the characters,
almost without exception, are white. That's a legitimate question.
But there still is an element of caricature to my work and I'm not
representing this kind of multi-cultural melting pot in my work just
for appearances sake. If you looked at my work based on race, the
work would call attention to itself in ways that would make it a
completely different kind of work. I don't make any apologies for not
doing that because it's for what purpose?

This is not autobiographical work, by any means. Even the emotions
involved. If someone thinks they understand me and disagree, then
okay. But there's something in the nature of comedy and especially in
the element of caricature and cartoons that my work retains. An
editorial cartoon is trying to be positive. It's usually really very
cloying and sappy and there's no hook to it at all. I also don't like
my humor to be in the service of making fun of people based on
superficialities. People get picked on or looked down at. I'm
conscious about that as a problem.

ART:21: Do you think there are elements of failure and longing in your
work?

PETTIBON: Longing yes, because I think it's work that is best when
there isn't any final resolution. When you don't finally arrive. And
failure...I have to say that maybe that's because this sort of work
tends to have more of a negative edge to it. There probably is more
failure depicted in my work then there is success.

ART:21: Is there sadness in the work?

PETTIBON: Yeah. I think maybe it's as much as humor. It's just more
latent. I think the life of the drawing is that you're always kept in
suspense. It's like a serial which goes on from day to day in the
paper. There's always something from the sky just about to fall on
you. Even though my work is usually just one drawing, it is more of a
narrative than it is a cartoon with a punch line and a resolution and
a laugh at the end.

- - - - -

...and what gets written about him in papers:

http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=3585

RAYMOND PETTIBON

Dispatches from the peculiar world of artist Raymond Pettibon

by Angela Carone

plus

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050929/news_lz1w29large.html

CENTERPIECE
Living large

Raymond Pettibon takes on a project at MCASD (http://www.mcasd.org) -
'I'm doing more wall works because of the opportunity. It's nice to
be asked'

By Robert L. Pincus
ART CRITIC

--
Pretty Good Pimp

http://www.bedoper.com

[Russell B]

What makes "PGP" so straight, and me so bent?

That was a lovely piece about Naomi Peterson. And what, pray tell, have
you got against San Pedro sunsets?

[PGP]

Russell B <bigf...@databasix.com> wrote in news:dl6t8b$amo$1
@blackhelicopter.databasix.com:

> That was a lovely piece about Naomi Peterson. And what, pray tell, have
> you got against San Pedro sunsets?

It's more that I'm a virulent anti-pelicanist.

[go go goblin!]

coz he dropped the soap in the shower.

--

- b f g

- s h a z b o t at f u s e dot n e t

- http://home.fuse.net/bobgoblin

[John_L...@yahoo.com]

I love it in the bum!

girl with a crush on JL
Hi.My name is Kjersti.But you can call me Kirsten.I am 13 years old
now,and I have 2 older brothers,Kenny and Keith.I was born in
Fairfax,Virginia.I now live in Iowa.I absolutly love the Moody
Blues,and John Lodge.He's in that band.I am actually an easy person to
get along with,unless someone gets on my nerves.Except my friends.I
like wild westerns t.v shows,like I'm watching right now.Bonanza. I am
a videogame freak.I also like cartoons.So thanks for visiting this
blog..KJ

kjerstilodge
Age: 13
Gender: female
Astrological Sign: Cancer
Zodiac Year: Monkey
Location: Belmond : Iowa : United States

About Me
I love to be outside in the sunshine,and to ride my go-cart. And I play
flute,and guitar. And I stare at John Lodge pictures alot.

How tall would you be if you had never cut your fingernails?
I wanta be 6 ft 1! Forget the fingernails!!

Interests
Video games John Lodge music and most importantly JOHN LODGE!!!
Favorite Movies
War of the Worlds Meet the Fockers Signs The Spongebob Movie.
Favorite Music
The Moody Blues Gwen Stafani Eric Clapton The Beatles Duran Duran 3
Doors Down The Police The Cars Foreigner Electric Light Orchestra.
Favorite Books
Stephen King books. I'm not a big reader.

Birthday: June 21, 1992
Biography:
I teach myself the guitar,and it is doing REALLY great! And I play the
flute.And I ride my go-cart alot,and do donuts in the backyard.
Location:
Belmond,Iowa
Interests:
Music,Rune Scape,Videogames,internet,and hanging out with my friends.

http://girlwithacrushonjl.blogspot.com

binkojr at frontiernet.net

www.moodytalk.com is where I hang and I love MissMoodyBlues