After attending an awkward industry-only midday peformance in Hollywood, I met Scott in the parking lot of the Roosevelt Hotel and we spoke for a blissful hour and a half of matters great and small. The meat of that interview will be published in the upcoming August issue of Mean (along with my interviews of Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, Towelhead star Summer Bishil, and my first sneaker column). In preparation of Dr. Dog’s amazing new album, Fate, which hits shelves tomorrow, my editor has given me permission to post some excerpts from the remainder of my rambling conversation with Scott McMicken here. Enjoy!

Download: “The Old Days” from the new album, Fate

Have you ever thought about creating a Dr. Dog musical?

That would be really awesome. We did this album, Psychedelic Swamp a long time ago, and we’ve always had dreams to make it a traveling piece of theater. There’s a real strong narrative throughout the album and it would be pretty easy and really fun to try and make it into a sort of low-budget theater production. But even a movie of that…

Is Psychedelic Swamp available anywhere? I’ve tried to find it before and haven’t had any luck.

No, it’s not. The problem is… we would have put it out already, but the concept on the album is that we didn’t make it, we got it in the mail. So the packaging is an envelope with our address on it. The idea is that we got it—this cassette tape—from this dude who used to live on earth, but escaped into this psychedelic parallel universe, as an effort to escape all the problems he was having on earth.

And when he got there, initially he was like, “Wow, this is awesome! Everything is so weird, and everything is upside down, with psychedelic aesthetics—nothing is predictable!” But over time, as he gained his frame of reference there, he realized that the same problems persist and there’s no real escape other than accepting and dealing with these issues that you have in your life. So he wants to make this album and send it back to earth to spread that message, like, “I’ve made this mistake, I thought I could escape but now I’m just trapped here. Everything’s the same.” And he appeals to us, saying, “Can you be the band that’s going to translate this music into modern American pop music, so that the message is understood?” He’s becoming so detached from reality the more he’s there, his ability to communicate and his way of going about representing information is becoming more and more garbled and detached and that’s why it sounds like a very psychedelic album.

The reason we haven’t put it out yet is because before we do that, I want to do what he’s asking us to do, which is to take all the music and re-record it as a live rock band with no psychedelic elements whatsoever. Very straightforward, immediate delivery, just like he wants it to be—a translation of his psychedelic mess. So when we do that, we’ll put ‘em both together and it’ll be like a double album.

Have you ever hopped a train?

No… I want to. My friends do that. I have a few friends who live that way, riding around on the rails, and there’s something about it that’s very romantic. The three people I know who do it, it’s not a big social thing—they’re not with a huge group of people. Most of the time they’re on their own, so it seems kinda cool. Dangerous—very dangerous. Probably very uncomfortable. In truth, I’ll probably never ever do that, but I certainly like the idea of that. All I can picture are horror stories of getting sucked under and your legs get chopped off.

A trio of Los Angeles-based artists comprised of former physics student/director-animator Miwa Matreyek, master projectionist/digital media artist Chi-wang Yang, and actress-musician Anna Oxygen (who also happened to curate Conversations That Never Happened), Cloud Eye Control explain themselves thusly:

Whether through a re-imagining of Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight, the discovery of powerful crystals underground, or one woman’s interstellar search for a new home, a common theme in our stories is human adaptation in a technological world. To realize these stories, we project pre-rendered animation and live camera imagery onto various surfaces on the stage, and this imagery functions as scenery and virtual actor. Both high and low tech methods are used to allow the live actor to interact with the media. These methods range from custom-built interactive video software to the physical manipulation of video puppets.

Thanks to my friend Patrick, I happened to catch their performance at the Redcat last night and was completely blown away. The manner in which they meld performance and video art is so complex, fascinating, and most of all entertaining, I’m pretty sure my mouth was locked in a permanent smile for the duration of their display.

I really hope they perform again soon, because I can’t wait watch it all again– but if you’re not busy tonight, I implore you to make a trip to the Redcat at 8:30 for their final performance at the NOW Festival. Just make sure you’re prepared to lose your shit.

200 portraits of Tamala’s friends and close relations make up the show, and they’re each pictured in the act of eating various foods against the uniform backdrop of Tamala’s navy blue kitchen wall. Shot over a span of two years, the images were unveiled for the first time at the Telic Arts Exchange on June 28th, arranged in a giant grid, like the biggest “MySpace Top Friends” ever. After a series of amazing-sounding dinner theater events that took place over the past three weeks, tomorrow night (July 19th) will mark the closing reception of the show, in the form of a “secret picnic café.”

Modeled after cafes in the Pacific Northwest D.I.Y. communities and historically referencing prohibition speakeasies, the café will use word of mouth to draw participants to a donation based picnic café, set up in and outside of TELIC. Paloma Parfrey will be recreating traditional picnic foods while Katie Byron reinvents what a picnic means through an installation. Performances begin @ 6pm.

Make sure to check it out before it disappears! Take a peek at a few shots of the show after the jump.

But wait, that’s not all! It also doubles as a free youth tutoring center run by 826LA, the So-Cal branch of McSweeney’s editor/literary superstar Dave Eggers‘ national network of non-profit programs dedicated to teaching students creative writing skills. I’ve been meaning to check out the Time Travel Mart since it opened this spring, so I finally got around to stopping by last night for the opening reception of a new installation in the storefront window. Los Angeles-based artist Amy Martin created a series of five posters that use a vintage travel agency aesthetic to advertise fabulous destinations throughout history and into the future.

The posters look fantastic up close– they remind me of something Scott Hansen would post on his highly refined design blog, ISO50. Currently on sale for just $20 at 826LA’s online store or at the center itself (1714 W. Sunset Blvd), all profits go towards “helping students 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write,” says Christina Galante, the store’s retail and events manager.

I was initially lured in to the show by Chippendale, whose zines I’ve become familiar with at stores like Family, Ooga Booga, and Giant Robot– but after checking out all the work, I’ve totally fallen in love with Matthew Thurber’s adorable intensity (e.g. the endearingly terrified horse in the picture above, entitled A Degree in Time Travel). I ended up slapping down a crisp Lincoln on the first issue of his new comic book, 1-800-Mice, which reads kinda like a Sally Cruikshank cartoon watched in the midst of a Vietnam acid flashback.

Stark and her cartoonist/drummer boyfriend, Ron Rege Jr., are the sole members of a new side project called Mystical Unionists. They played a low-key yet sublime show at the aptly titled Hope Gallery in Echo Park this weekend, where Rege’s artwork is currently on display.

“This is entirely about the aural,” says Stark, hoping to effect a sea change, one small drop at a time, from the hegemony of the male perspective towards something much less aggressive. If she can get this small, devoted audience to even slightly alter the way they process things, perhaps it can affect a widespread shift towards the global acceptance of “love” and “peace” she’s always touting in her music, with utmost sincerity. “Close your eyes and let go of the visual,” she advises before launching into a subdued melody. “Well, except for Ron’s art,” she qualifies. “You should look at that.”

Armed only with a microphone masking-taped to a wooden stick and a pair of carefully decorated floor toms, Mystical Unionists sounds something like a campfire lament at the end of the world and a hopeful appeal to America’s frozen heart. Ron and Becky are a dynamic duo whose artwork couldn’t be more aligned. In her lyrics and his cartoons, in her stage banter and his illustrations, the couple is devoted to building a Utopian world that shares the optimistic ideals of the 60’s, minus the questionable hippie trends of the day (is anyone really longing for a revival of door beads and lava lamps?).

“I had a dream the other night,” Becky tells me when I approach her after the show, “where everything I had ever thrown out was turning into cups of tea that I was forced to drink. Every piece of Scotch Tape– everything.” A regime change or a liberal political upheaval is good, Becky says, but we can’t rely on politics to change the world for us. “Each one of us is accountable for everything we do.” Somehow, when Becky says it, it sounds less like a lecture and more like a fun challenge, full of dancing and color and song. Becky Stark is our generation’s Yoko Ono.

Check out 21 pictures I took at the show, after the jump!

Update: Apparently, the Blobwall completely collapsed just hours after these photos were taken. Damn unreliable construction robots!

The 16th issue of Mean magazine is on newsstands across the country today! I’ve got five articles in the new issue– which is partially why I’ve been so absent from the online world lately. I had a lot of fun this issue! I got to interview one of my favorite artists, Matt Furie; my junior high school literary hero, Chuck Palahniuk– who ended up asking for a JPEG of my dick; fascinating documentarian Marina Zenovich, who made a film about Roman Polanski’s convoluted sex scandal; and some really exciting fashion designers– Danish freak-folk threesome Hui-Hui and RISD wunderkind Katie Gallagher.

You can pick up Mean at Borders, Virgin Megastore, and Barnes & Noble all over the U.S. and Canada.