Free Parking
Storytelling in the Digital Age
My lifelong friend, Pleasant Gehman and I have been regular guest lecturers at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music since 2016. The musicologist, Professor Jessica Schwartz is a bonafide Gilman Street punk and carries the torch in her classes.
This group shot is from a panel discussion held in Professor Schwartz’s class in 2016, on the eve of the Lobotomy exhibit at Lethal Amounts in downtown LA.
Two highlights remain in the forefront of my memory -
ONE: The Merch Girl Incident
This was an ad hoc business school lecture extemporized by Pleasant when a young man in the audience demeaned the role of the Merch Girl in a touring unit.
This is an excerpt from a post from August 20, 2025 - YOU WEREN’T FUCKING THERE. We promised we would be bringing War Stories to the world via the World Wide Web and here we are!!!
Here’s the link to register for the WAR STORIES ZOOM.
The second highlight of that UCLA day: Gabriel Garza.
Gabriel Garza was a student in that UCLA seminar. He told me that after I met him in person, four years later, when we started working to promote the theatrical piece he the co-wrote together with Theresa Chavez - ADOBE PUNK. Theresa Chavez has been mounting theatrical productions in Los Angeles since 1988. I am privileged to have surfed the wave of multiple iterations of ADOBE PUNK since 2020. For its inaugural workshop reading, Los Angeles historian Richard Schave and I participated in a post-show Q&A about LA architectural history and how intertwined punk rock is with the East LA / Californios / Chicano scene.
The second iteration I participated in featured a ZINE as a program, based on the story of ADOBE PUNK, and carrying the spirit of Lobotomy and the other zines that were DIY-published in the LA area in the 70s and 80s, such as Flipside, Backdoor Man, and of course, Slash.
Texas punk rocker, Nina Diaz (Girl in a Coma) worked with the actors and Chavez and Garza to lend her own punk chops to the music the band in the play writes and performs.
I’m leaving these images of the ADOBE PUNK zine program as full size photos to make it easier for you to read.
WAR STORIES is more than dirty dishes and X-ray vision (fun as that may be), it’s also an eye-opening look at all the tentacles that make up LA punk. Kid Congo Powers, X, The Bags, The Zeros, Los Lobos, The Blasters - all came up in the backyard/house party DIY scene in East LA and The Other Valley (that would be the San Gabriel Valley, as opposed to The Valley - San Fernando), and it is an essential but less celebrated aspect of LA punk.
With a bunch of OG punks assembled, who knows what stories will unfold, what secrets will be revealed, and what history will be unearthed!
Best of all, it’s online - on Zoom - FREE PARKING (haha!) any one in the world can attend, so sign up here —→ Register at Eventbrite
It’s all happening SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, NOON PACIFIC TIME
Free parking - come as you are
These folks will be there —
