Peter's Storage Space & Dolls

From Zuade: "a portrait I took of Peter in front of our place in Los Feliz" (Photo by Zuade Kaufman)

When Mark and I went to LA in January to clean out Peter's storage space, we had no idea what to expect in there. It was way the hell out in some college-y looking CA town, and we went in a three-car caravan with Beth, Zuade and Paris.
I should have taken a picture of the contents, which roughly broke down to food (dorm fridge, mixer, blender), decrepit furniture bits, clothes (Peter's old leather coat fit Paris perfectly and became his), lots of fishing gear, some music equipment, and several large bags of tools - serious tools that you could build a house with. Of course there were tapes and DVDs and CDs. There were books of every description from library sales and used book stores that he picked up like a magpie. There were tons of rolls of heavy tape.
And there were pieces of art-to-be: sparkly, glittery, shiny, and patterned; fabric, paper, lights, paints, and colored glue; all of which for us was just pretty trash. Mark said that Peter would have been furious that we were fucking with his stuff that way.
It was awful.

From Heather:
Hey Gretl, just found this, thought you might get a kick out of these dolls Peter made long ago, for our first issue of Rattler though we didn't use them. He made a mask of Medusa for the cover instead, can't remember why.

(Art by Peter Haskell)
He sculpted them all by hand out of papier mache, then hand painted them. We had a lot of fun finding the props and stuff. I helped sew some of the clothes, which reminded me of making stuff for my Barbies-but they are purely Peter's creations. As you can see, there is a tourist couple in the front, then left to right, a "gay cruiser," as he put it, a cholo, a bag lady and a new waver.