Forrest Gillespie’s Assassins Hours, Pleaseeasaur and artist David Best

Blue blood
Nothing gets to the core of my love for Chico more than the early years of the Blue Room Theatre. It was an exciting time, during the mid-’90s, when brothers Denver and Dylan Latimer and their posse of creative friends took the wild community theater from their infamous backyard Butcher Shop productions up those stairs above Collier Hardware to create a home for fresh, exciting underground theater and music that Chico could call its own.

I admit that, at the time, I was most interested in what was going on on the “wood room” side of the theater, where the scene shop/rehearsal area doubled as a live concert venue. Way back then, the man charged with keeping the rock room sweaty was one Ed Gillespie, the gangly, loveable smartass with chronic bedhead who helped keep the struggling theater flush with some of the most memorable rock shows of my time in Chico.

Ed left years ago, eventually winding up in New York City—where many Blue Room ex-pats have migrated—to write and produce plays, which he’s currently doing with the Dome Theater Co.

This week, Ed (now going by Forrest Gillespie) brings some of the old-school flavor back to the Blue Room as he and the Dome folks come to town for a two-night run of his latest original work, Assassins Hours (Today, Nov. 13, 10:30 p.m. and Friday, Nov. 14, 11:30 p.m.). It’s a comedy with live music set in a Brooklyn tenement where a finger pointer, a tranny and a schizophrenic are involved in “an imagined love triangle” … there’s also something about pigs in there. Dylan Latimer stars with Dylan Gauthier (pictured above) and Ken Reynolds, with music by Containers.

Dynamic visitor No. 1
Even if you have never hit The Playa, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of sculptor David Best. His enormous recycled-wood temples have been a fixture at Burning Man since 2000 (though he did take 2008 off), where they’ve been popular destinations on which personal notes and remembrances have been scrawled before the structures are ceremoniously burned down at festival’s end (see picture of Temple of Joy at right).

The ambitious artist will be at Chico State (Ayres 120) Tonight at 7 p.m., to speak as a guest of the Art and Art History Department.

Dynamic visitor No. 2
The Pleaseeasaur is coming to Chico! Pleaseeasaur (please-ee-uh-saur) is comedian/musician JP Hasson (left) and projectionist/costume designer/multimedia guy Thomas Hurley, and their two-man show is kind of hard to describe. The fact that their album was released on Comedy Central Records should tell you something, as should the fact that they tour with the likes of Neil Hamburger and the Trachtenburg Family. Look forward to tunes like “You’ve Got the Tough” (“You don’t think you’ve got what it takes / Well, you’re wrong, ’cause you’re rad, yes you’re cool”) and “Bone Noodle Hot” (“I just can’t help but enjoy that flavor taste!”).

Pleaseeasaur arrives Wednesday, Nov. 19, at Monstros Pizza (with Joe Jack Talcum of Dead Milkmen fame!).

Cheap art
I’m still not entirely sure how it all works, but I do know that local artist and arts rabble rouser Max Infeld is giving himself away for free, or at least he was this past weekend when he handed me a handbill that read “FREE ME / I’m at your service 24/7.” It appears to be an expansive group art show/performance art project that offers, for free, “devices and performances” by Infeld and other artists. Go to www.freepublicrentals.com and see what you can get out of it—maybe something for free? … Or maybe you have something to give away?

DEVOtion
Please join me in sending out a big, fat, overdriven, howling, feedback-wailing wall of happy birthday love to West By Swan bandmates, brothers and Arts DEVO BFFFs Dave and Dan Greenfield, who both celebrate birthdays this week. I won’t spill their ages here … other than to say that Dan’s rhymes with “Lordy!”