Back issues of Great God Pan magazine are still available in limited quantities for $10 post paid. Issues are thick and collectible, with full-color covers and perfect binding. Great God Pan #14âSalt Desert Tales Mark Sundeen and Erik R. Bluhm, the editors and principal writers of the journal Great God Pan, were residents in Wendover, […]
Aside from the scant notations on the reissues of the Relatively Clean Rivers and The Beat of the Earth LPs, there’s very little info about their creator, outré California musician Phil Pearlman. Starting off with surf/car tunes in the early ‘60s (Phil and the Flakes), by ’66 Pearlman—decidedly more “earthy, unpretentious, [and] ‘organic’” than the […]
It should surprise no one to learn that Exley’s lifelong delusions germinated not in the somber countryside and grey cities of the East, but at Exley’s place of undergraduate learning?the University of Southern California in the downtown heart of the city that manufactures fantasy. -from Great God Pan #12, 1998 “Other men might inherit from […]
From where Im standing on the old Wendover airbase, the brightest thing in the sky is the State Line Casino. Its an square concrete castle bathed in white light. A marquee blinks and flashes. The giant neon-light cowboy is waving at me from just that side of the Nevada border. Come on in, he seems […]
As a fledgling evangelist in the 1910s, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson was not sure why God had called her from the midwest to sunny California. As often happens with the prophets, the matter was settled by revelation. “Eventually God gently but unquestionably began to show me that he had led me to Los Angeles, to […]
The beaches and arroyos swarmed with them. Their ambling paths wove through the region?s densest chaparral and underbrush. They congregated in great numbers in places that reveal their presence to this day?Big Bear, Los Osos, Grizzly Bear Flats. It is thought that upwards of 150,000 grizzly bears once roamed the oak-dotted hills of California. Settlers […]
Attention East Coasters and humidity dwellers: Greenpoint Energyite Brother Mike Paré will be celebrating the release of his new artist book, Vehicles of the Ancients, ths Friday night, August 1 from 7-9 pm at Cinders Gallery (103 Havemeyer betwixt Hope and Grand) in Williamsburg. We just got back from an extended trip to Gotham and […]
This summer the performance duo Los Super Elegantes debuted their third play, a musical entitled The Falling Leaves of St. Pierre, at Javier Peres’ new space in Chinatown. The story unravels within the House of St. Pierre, where the renowned fashion designer, a visionary in sunglasses and an ivory caftan, conjures his newest lines. The […]
Dudes are all into soft psych, sunshine pop, and whatever these days. Those English reissue labels can’t transfer the vinyl to CD fast enough. Of course a lot of that stuff bites and that’s why we’re happy that Pet Records is around to separate the wheat from the chaff. We recently came across this interview […]
Of all the mysteries of old California, perhaps the most elusive is that of the Lost Ship of the Desert. Tales are told of men stumbling across the remains of a seagoing vessel stranded in the sand in the southeastern corner of the state. Some even camped in the lee of the rotting timbers, unaware […]
