The CD ‘Lonely Street’ for the greater part contains recordings by Destroy All Monsters members Cary Loren and Jim Shaw at Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead lower level in 2013. Kelley’s Mobile Homestead is a full-scale replica of the house in the Detroit suburb of Westland where the artist grew up. Meant to house local cultural activities and events, the replica of Kelley’s childhood home was fitted with a detachable facade enabling it to be driven through various neighbourhoods of Detroit offering public services on the way. The Mobile Homestead is based at MoCAD Detroit as a permanent work of art. MOCAD’s Department of Education and Public Engagement programs the ground floor of the Mobile Homestead as a community space, as Mike Kelley intended.
Beneath the public rooms on the ground floor of the homestead, a complex basement has been built that mirrors the floor plan of the original Kelley family home. The individual rooms can not be entered directly from one another. Anyone going underground has to navigate labyrinthine hallways and climb up and down ladders to reach different rooms. Mike Kelley: “Mobile Homestead covertly makes a distinction between public art and private art, between the notions that art functions for the social good, and that art addresses personal desires and concerns. Mobile Homestead does both: it is simultaneously geared toward community service and anti-social private sub-cultural activities. It has a public side and a secret side…”
A year after Mike Kelley’s death in 2012 Destroy All Monsters co-founders Cary Loren and Jim Shaw descended into the Mobile Homestead’s lower level to pay tribute to the friend they had lost. Most tracks on the ‘Lonely Street’ CD are recordings of that session in May 2013, which opened with a musical invocation of Mike Kelley. Other tracks are short recordings, jingles produced by Destroy All Monsters for the comprehensive ‘Vision In A Cornfield’ installation at MoCAD in 2012. Also included on the CD is the 2001 recording ‘Kranky Halloween’ by Mike Kelley, Cary Loren and Cameron Jamie. The CD-R was edited and produced in a limited edition of 100 by Cary Loren for The End Is Here in 2016 and comes with a signed and hand titled photograph by Cary Loren plus envelope.