Wednesday, February 28, 2018

War Stories & A Teenage Historical Record of Punk Rock

Ever since the late 1970s birth of punk rock in their Los Angeles home, Pleasant Gehman and Theresa Kereakes have been bearing witness and keeping records through their diaries, their notorious fanzine, Lobotomy: The Brainless Magazine,and their journalism and photography.

Four decades after the first sloppy punk rock power chord awakened the wild youth who became the original punk rockers, their influence continues and flourishes. Punk rock's first wave have become household names and their records and their books and memoirs come to life in live presentations such as WAR STORIES: Tales of 70s and 80s Punk Mayhem Told By the Perpetrators Themselves.

Pleasant and Theresa are bringing these WAR STORIES to a stage near you. 

STAY TUNED

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

So This Happened

On February 9, 2018 at UCLA's Punk Conference, "Curating Resistance," Pleasant and Theresa recounted the teenage historical record of 1970s Los Angeles punk by explaining why and how they published Lobotomy: The Brainless Magazine.

LA Taco reported on it: While the conference was educational in nature, there was a sense of merging the academic and the personal. The event’s speakers included author Stacy Russo, whose recent book We were Going to Change the World: Interviews with Women from the 1970s and 1980s Southern California Punk Rock Scene, and Tanya Pearson from Women of Rock Oral History Project, both of whom have stressed the importance of women telling their own stories. On Friday, Pleasant Gehman and Theresa Kereakes recounted their days as young punks who documented the Hollywood scene as it unfolded in the zine Lobotomy. It’s punk as a means of making yourself heard and that also might be reflective of what is happening with the presence of this counterculture movement at major institutions.


UCLA's campus paper, The Daily Bruin previewed the conference.


The punk rock weekend ended with a sold-out spoken word show at Hollywood's El Cid, featuring storytelling from LA's original punk rockers, Exene Cervenka (X), Jane Wiedlin (The GoGo's), Iris Berry (The Ringling Sisters), Mike Martt (Tex & the Horseheads), and Bob Forrest (Thelonius Monster), with Pleasant and Theresa serving as emcees as well as storytellers.