Calicacky Dreaming

Les La L'Anniversary Blues

2005-02-04T13:05:00.000-08:00

A year on (this past Monday), celebrations and regrets are a hair-weave; subway delays and winter slush a fade. Though talking back to the East Coast, or seeing the Apple flicker as some producer’s chosen backdrop on my telly, ushers in a deep unease of the soul. Eemmeegrant 4 Life indeed.

A lot of the things proselytized about this place are true – snobbed-up, media-fed EC’s may only be exploring one small strip of the sprawl, but some generalizations are dead-spot accurate. That I’m not of this place is apparent and somewhat reassuring (that nobody else is, totally besides the point – “of course they belong, darling.”) Although, I too have purchased a tracksuit...umm, to blend in.

But this place does contain vast multitudes and that, la muchacha, is its main attraction, the dizzying possibilities is one helluva great redeemer as Deities go. You bang your shin on a 2000-year-old redwood, watch a sunset over the Desert peaks or swerve not to hit the coyote with the balls to wander round Franklin during Friday rush hour, and the word “opportunity” gets redefined. So what if some of the philosophers here are less Ninja and more Barney fucking Fife – and thus even harder to respect when their triumph is my cold porridge. Dealing with that motherfucker is how we do -- or learn to. Cause you are never too old.

***
More on writing from LA: Bernie Weinraub does not go out a sucka, but does question his higher purpose. (from the NYT).

***
“Folk songs are evasive - the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn’t be comfortable with it any other way.” – Bob Dylan, "Chronicles - Volume One," p.71

City Phrases II: Adaptation & In No Sense

2005-01-05T22:48:00.000-08:00

In which my adopted hometown plays itself:
"To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion. Though I am speaking about sensibility only - and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous - these are grave matters."
- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp" (1964)

A New Year at One Edge of the World

2005-01-02T13:49:00.000-08:00

Around 3pm of '05 and it’s all heavy shadows in Malibu. The western winter light is soft and slightly golden over some deep pocket of the Pacific, peeking to add faint outlines to the blue-gray canvas of clouds. Beach semi-crowded by families and birds, watching dolphin dances and one lone surfing lesson in which the female student keeps falling whenever she tries to stand on the board. Judging from the number of (random, very random) people I know who’ve taken it up, I bet “learn to surf” is a common resolution in les la LA. Probably a good hangover cure on a New Year’s Day like today. Though nothing seems likely to clear up today.

Jared Diamond, author of the great "Guns, Germs and Steel," on the falls of civilizations and what causes them (in the New York Times).

Proof that even the politicians in Los Angeles embody the stereotypes (from AP via NYT).

Winter Leaves (and February Flowers too…)

2004-12-30T01:32:00.000-08:00

They don’t all fall in the autumn here. Some big green and brown palms can still be seen dropping limbs upon the Lincoln Continentals cruising the Hollywood Blvd. stretch west of LaBrea, past the block on which the slightly crispy folk music tutor types sell home-made hollow-body instruments three days a week, and the street-corner with the light box where a stencil of California burns in the endless sunshine. Though nothing’s getting singed at the moment.

Instead, the cold December rains have taken over, as Biblical as the Book of Axl predicted – give or take a slight calendar discrepancy/delay, though it still seemed an old winter’s song – and much more omnivorous than the ones I brought back from the Emerald Isle in October. 4 inches in a day is crazy shit, especially for people used to holding sunburned hands even after the days have start to grow short.

Nat King Cole Station Post Office (90004) is located at Western and 2nd, halfway up the block from a beautiful corner store-front that’s part Art Deco, part pimp Pharaoh. It’s for rent. Not for rent and right down the street are the world’s only consciously abstract KFC (situated in a Cali late modern commercial space), the non-denominational Vietnamese Christian church and hall (long strings of holiday lights descending festively from its bright neon steeple cross), and the Korean Buddhist temple which looks like it could’ve once been a mosque.

Few opportunities are missed on this strip, and most good ‘uns are recycled by the global masses again consuming American scraps, this time from the overfed table of Los Angeles’ bubble-ical real estate market. Driving around in downpours, you notice these people welcome the rain sans the histrionics, having designed their newly acquired backyards to spring back to glorious life in late winter of their discontent, just as the first-run South Calicackians of privilege begin seasonal shopping for summer retreats and new pants-skirt combinations that better fit.

Hype Men...

2004-12-21T13:55:00.000-08:00

...fantasy boosters, eternal dream peddlers. They’re loved up in the sunny Southland -- a mighty local breed. Aggrandizement is not just a privilege reserved for well-paid specialists round here, all become adept at hawking desires after living here long enough, constantly pitching, even if just a toss on the side. (Stay tuned for Les La LA's "USC Football is soooo Dope" pre-Bowl blowout.)

But hype professionals consume entire worlds, flattening formerly enjoyable aspects of everyday-people life, deceiving you into wondering if it is actually better than the original?

The most immediately irritating hype-men are the ones getting on-stage with DJs, promoters selling when the sale’s final, whack MC’s dousing parties right and quickly. Ruining J-Roccc or Egon's sets at Stones Throw, pulverizing a hot-shit Firecracker Anniversary tag-team by Arabian Lover and Egyptian Prince(random WC hip-hop nirvana), or whooping Alpha Tae Omega-like through Kenny Larkin’s mixing board masterpiece in a Glendale warehouse (random LA techno Valhalla). Sprays of inside-baseball shout-outs, verbal floods and rave-stick beacons, when all the stoned soul children wanna do is the rock away, in peaceful musicales ecstasis (or some approximation thereof). But tell ‘em to shut the fuck up and you’re the bad guy.

More consistently insidious are critics pushing local lore to the head of the class. Every Southland industry has ‘em, but bonus plagues upon the local pop boosters and their bottomless inferiority complexi, meek scrubs to the media machinations of the Apple, the sub-cultural absolutists of the Bay, the brain twista salt-of-the-Earth-ians from Windy, every college scene with a decent Cultural Studies thrift store, and, most of all, the Holly Biz nobody beats. (Someone should explore EC-WC rivalries as offshoot of 213’s self-consciousness mental subservience.) By their token, each local undie MC is under-rated by the industry, every freeform digital noise-fest is the next Aphex/electric Miles/Slint, and all the 9pm’ers at Spaceland are better than whoever New York critics are currently getting bandwagon-esque about. All possibly true in individual practice, but never as a rule.

The eternal Southland peddlers helped build the City of Quartz" by selling not just celluloid dreams and sun-out-the-backdoor somedays, but whole infrastructures that supposedly manufacture them. Be willing to play with the machine’s controls, and it just might handover your every wish.

Fire Wheel Burning in the Air (2 Days in November)

2004-11-04T16:52:00.000-08:00

Just like that other dark Tuesday, it was a gorgeous morning. No traffic to the West Hollywood temple where I punched my card, a long but friendly cue, a game-plan for the day coming together. Rocketing down the Golden State, KG and I gazed in wide wonder at the snow-capped San Bernadinos to the east, and agreed with James LCD: indeed, a good day for "Yeah!"

When we got to Watts, the kids were talking about getting acquainted with the ballot-box because they knew their neighborhood would be the first stop for the coming-round bus of Sickle-wielding recruiters in camo hoods; meanwhile, Questlove had plenty of Afro room in the Scion he used to chauffeur first-time voters to the polls before he had to get to sound-check. In Echo Park, as every other district we heard reports from, the high turn-out turned us on.

This was before we knew we were dead, before we realized that we had no losing exit strategy from this evening, before hope emerged from the Heineken bottles I was emptying at a dizzying pace all night, and said there was some other places she had to be. KG couldn't fall asleep, but I couldn't stand being awake.

Wednesday, after the concession, she and I drove around shell-shocked -- first, down the recline of the East Side's unnamed streets, then a hillside cemetery in Glendale. And I swear I could already hear the Gods of Free Commerce, Manifest Democracy, and Strict Interpretation scheming about how they could improve the traffic up in here, while the iPod played "good night to the rock and roll era."

That night, instead of enlightenment, Los Feliz got a blackout. No lie.

Apologies, Upon the Return to a Hillside Hacienda

2004-09-07T17:57:00.000-07:00

Sorry Langan, readers. Been running round the country, rallying the half-million-strong nay-sayers, saluting my hometown for its taste in resistance chic, and crying at how far off the pier Mayor Mike's pushed the civil liberties of his constituents. If any motherfucker should pay for the charade of Tom DeLay-loving Republicans calling NYC home (even for a week), it should be that Buffoon Bloomberg.

America's future looked ugly from the street -- there's only 47 more days to change that. Don't just stand there! Do something!!!

Electrocles-la-LAshing (Rock over Cali, pt.2)

2004-07-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

Excuse me Angelenos, but how many of you woke up this morning with a re-newed Miss Kittin fetish, the sweat and the spilled milk from last night's Key Club gig soaking the sheets? Big woman ina grey mini-dress and thigh-high black leather stompers, "inhale" and "exhale" tatooed on either arm, dropping industrialized Berlin-born techno bombs, mixing like she's a seceret UR member, while singing songs of sex and strength...and having the capacity crowd of frat-kids, goths, gay boys, punters and puntettes singing right back at her. Thank goodness Larry Tee's ridiculous marketing campaign, which rounded up talent under a ridiculous musical tag that became a punchine before it had a definition, has only worked on the 4th estate gullibles. Consider the decks taken back, motherfuckers!

The Burning of Los Angeles

2004-07-22T21:33:00.000-07:00

The first thing that made Nathanael West's The Day of the Locusts stand up and be counted was the inclusion of an oafish character named Homer Simpson in its pages. (Funny that, Groening's genius score drops a tenth of a point -- or should it rise? Hmmm?) But its permanent impression was left on me by the venom West sprayed in every direction of Thirties Hollywood Oasis, which is the novel's subject matter. Old Nate doesn't spare hisself in the process neither, though as the overseer he is much kinder when he's looking in the mirror than when he's observing the lower casts. I can see Hubert Selby injecting a little bit of West in his literary vein a few cycles later, when he started dragging already dirty Brooklynites through the gutters.

Day was one wise Cassandra's recommended read upon my move to Les La LA. Appreciated as another Amerlit pebble in an exponentially growing beach, its sense of entitlement and high air also made me kinda nuts. Whatever assumptions Day made about "people who come to die in California" that still make sense years later -- and don't get me wrong, it gets a lot of star-fucking, bottom-dwelling, blind, blond, illiterate ambition quite right, and I'm gonna steal from it for years to come -- the novel also betrays Left Coast Fitzgerald's hollow, how-high self-esteem. It's like what Fox News always accuses Northeast liberals of being -- without also mentioning that people in the red states are shiningly, happily ignorant -- squeezed into 200 page album of horrid human behavior. Lacking any real empathy but feeling like his prankish honesty with himself is a saving grace (Not!), the narrator/artist seeks to be the documentor of his doomed, scummy mates. His detachment's mirrored in the author's, as though the mansion on the hill is all in the mind, and he doesn't have to interact with the valley-dwellers.

Which it, to some degree, is, and he doesn't, I guess. But I still felt like I was prosecuting myself when reading the book and getting mad at it. I mean ... jeez, just read the tone of this blog [still in development, ed.]. So, maybe, 6 months in, it's re-evaluation time? Continue to skewer the dim bizzers and hipsterati, the Valley residents impervious to their own desperate states, the overachievers who've sold the soul but think it reappears every time the tie is unwound? Or admit that you have joined them, in a state that is different than the one you left. For better or worse, but certainly not til death do us part.

Palms on my Lawn

2004-07-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

The history of palm trees in the Los Angeles valley, and their dire prognosis.

This Land is My LAnd

2004-07-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

Freedom weekends have the free will to last three days. Sometimes four. If you're free from the stresses of labor, they last even longer. Though you may end up feeling not nearly as free to feel celebratory.

My first July 4th on the Left Coast, and I was getting all nationalistic, ready to fly my freak flag, and expose myself to more explosions in the sky than these immigrant eyes have simultaneously beheld (on my own rooftop, no less). This not-quite overdose of red, white & blue kool-aid was played out in three acts, and may have been caused by the bad taste Michael Moore's liberal pornography left on my tongue the night before. (Good intentions not being enough to save pissed off grannies and grieving mothers from resembling propoganda messengers.) Fear not: the colors were foreign, faded, filled fith frivolousity...

Sky Blue: "Hellas! Go-o-o-o-o-o-L! Hellas!"
You may have heard: the Greeks won Euro 2004, a futbol tournament which monopolized most of my June gloom mornings. And, in fact, the mid-day of L'America's 228th anniversary was spent in brain-lock-down, focused on the sporting rites of the Old Continent. (At first) hoping the overachieving Hellenes weren't handed their cleats and jocks by Portugal -- (then) caffeinatedly hoping that their lone goal would stand. It did, and was deserving, creative well beyond the sports-page reviews, and the biggest international team-sporting upset since Carter's hockey team beat Brezhnev's in the media battle for Whose Afghanistan is it Anyway? (No one at the BBC had Al MIchaels' old script, cause Disney copyrighted it .) At 2pm, I wasn't thinking hot dogs and apple pie, so much as souvlaki -- but guide-less and clueless to the location of Les La LA's Greektown...

Fleshy Pink Areola: "In the Groodies of the Standard (Downtown)"
Instead, Katie G and I consumed booze by the rooftop pool of a swank hotel, which was celebrating Freedom Weekend by encouraging its omnipresent media-ratti guests and hangers-on to go let it all hang out...errr, waist-up. Finally gave me the chance to study up on another famed LA past-time: real or fake? "Freedom from" made this country great; "freedom to" has made its philosophic relevance a faint glimpse (or maybe even a sham). Dirty Dirty Deitz played tech'd up versions of hits by late-century masters, the tits flapped with design-perfect (nee, Matrix-like) circumferance, and the muscle-bound dork with the red, doo-rag headband and the Born in the USA jacket made us laugh. The tyranny of the righteous, it seems, has seeped down from the DC Federales to the fawnish, pop culture mouth-pieces who mimic them even as they vote the other way, culminating in fun (no fun!) with $10 vodka/rocks. At least there's the reliably good pours.

Foggy Gray-White of Smoke: "I'm Getting Used to it Now"
So, rather than drive into the hills to sweat the Hollywood Bowl from above, KG and I decided to join our chiller-than-comatose neighbors on the roof, and see what we can find in the night-time sky. The ensuing visuals were Les La LA to a fault. No single fireworks display up close, but dozens scattered on the horizons, in, yes, a veritable sprawl. I wish I could say, "I love the smell of gun-powder in the evening," but that'd be a lie.

July 4th PS: Michael Ignatieff on America's promise and American dellusions, hysterics not included.

Home entertainment PPS: Video choice for the weekend, Katie's introduction to The Kingdom .

LA Metro PPPS: So I took LA's version of the subway downtown to MOCA on Thursday 7/1 -- to see Olympia, WA ambient, quadro-delicists Growing play at the Minimalism show -- and it acts an awful lot like Washington DC's. Except for the oh-so-Euro lack of turnstyles, a spatial freedom that forces every rider into adhering to an honor code enforced by a city whose very existance and thirst-quenching survival is based on doing an end-around honor.

Les La BouilLAbaise I

2004-06-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

"LA, it's a nice place to visit...but a better place to leave, right? All those palm trees are such a bore."
- Steve Coogan in Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarrettes" (2004)

Friday, June 25th, 10:50pm (Sunset Blvd.)
Returning from seeing the sadly mediocre (respite from writer's block) "Coffee and Cigarrettes" in Pasadena, we're sneaking back the frontside of the Echo Park hills, avoiding the Friday night freeway frenzy. Sunset is an open road until Silverlake. Except, that is, for the silver Buick approaching quickly in the rearview, the outline of a driver (solo) doing a strange jerk behind the wheel -- blissfully oblivious or an accident waiting to happen, most likely both. Cars being self-contained pods here, people exhibit very little control over their actions inside vehicular private spaces. Of both the stop-sign pedicure and the air-guitar audition variety. I used to get the evil eye over my walkmania, feeling a groove so hard I'd scare/piss off/amuse half the IRT. Here, everyone's too busy within their own pod -- a fact RJ also alluded to when discussing the California artist mind-set. The Buick accelerates past us in the passing lane, ready to make a screeching left onto Manon, but slow enough for the answer to be revealed: A youngish, mightily overweight black kid rocking Dizzee's "Fix Up Look Sharp."

A popular California pastime I'll pass on: driving all night, getting nowhere, enjoyed by Generations V - Z.

"I got 99 problems but my car ain't one."
- used auto lot advert jingle on Power 106, local hip-hop behemoth, on Tuesday (6/29) morning.

L'Artistic Milieux

2004-06-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

One perennial beef against La La has always been its lack of cultural imagination. But honestly, the place where fake tits = aspiration, bad Nielsens = minimal requirement, and reading is discouraged in cars and in public areas (attention = safety, apparently), that place doesn't so much lack acumen as simply chooses which flourescent lights it wants to trip out to and be convinced by. Take two...events this weekend, proving that when it comes to turning Hollywoodies into cultural bohos, La La's marketers can nail the best Madison Avenue asses with the hammers of obvious. But they can also let shit be, not paying attention to natural growth (breasts, audience or verbal comprehension).

Thursday (17th) night, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosted a free, all-night (7p-7a) Tiki party with singles (neither the 12" or 45rpm kind), (nameless) DJs, and a friggin' Sheppard Fairey decorated scooter for a raffle-prize. No, not the art-rave of my nightmares. Just a chance to score an art-hottie before mom asks if you're gay -- at least that's what attendees told me they were doing there (instantly making me wonder where Katie was). Tiki theme + bad records on a worse soundsystem + pick-up scene + museum = a perfect example of organized La La stylee high culture. But only for the young people, of course -- "hide those 35 and overs pronto," you could hear LACMA's promotions head yelling in the background. At 1am: there was still hundreds of people lined up and down Wilshire, trying to get in. Prooving that in La La, like in the backstage pen of Radiohead concerts, meeting people you like is not easy...and I hope she's still there. Final tally was over 9000 art-lovers, with nary a mention of art in either the invite or by the survivors. Apparently LACMA subscriptions were up tho. Can't wait for that Playboy anniversary exhibit now. Read the LA Times "review", and be thankful for the PS1 summer program.

Though, you don't have Dublab, so fuck you. The art-music collective threw a party called Up Our Sleeve on Saturday (19th) in some dilapidated downtown space - but conveniently next to a parking lot - decorated with nothing but 450 custom-made record sleeves made by the likes of Mr. Scruff, DNTeL, and Carly Eisenman. Packed to the gills, after a $10 donation and a last-minute change of venue, it was LA east-side "hip" personified -- tho, thankfully, no trying. Its only aspirations seemed to be a night with booze and girls who like boys who dig girls who like '80s style, and DJs who play "Rapture" and that great Miss Kittin track that endorses "bitch"-beating. Excepting the free Red Stripe (which can only mean one thing), it was the sort of DIY art-hang that would get a ton of play back home as a scene or a movement. But here, only those who care paid attention (which means: no media coverage), and the turn-out implied the care's there. Imagine the idea of actual adult group-art endeavors with eyes (seemingly) not on the bottom line. Plus, a grasp of community. There was also a lot more picking up going on at the Dublab event -- hopefully, the eventual sex was better too. All they lacked was a proper dance-party.

Somewhere between: Ed Ruscha's kid is DJ'ing an opening night at the Pacific Design Center. Don't know what to think about that. But I'm going to Hollertronix instead.

The Slight Return

2004-06-17T20:26:00.000-07:00

No I haven't forgotten. 2+ months off just means I was preoccupied with making a life for myself in the 323, and saying good bye to life-long friends and intense relationships. If I'da learned Photo Shop and set up server space before cracking open the Diaries, maybe it'd be cuter. But all good things in all good time. Plus, this way Katie gets to school me.

James Turrell & the LA Sky Box

2004-03-31T18:24:00.000-08:00

Friends know: I love synchronicity.

A couple of weeks ago, the NYTMag did a short piece about a new installation house that light artist James Turrell built in the Hollywood Hills. The "skyspace" is a house that uses artificial and natural light, and our perceptions of it, to create illusions out of our perceptions. Trippy, black light stuff.

Then, during last weekend's sojourn to Pittsburgh for the Wimp Factor XIV reunion concerts, Katie and I went wandering around the Mattress Factory, a great minimalist museum on the Northside. Lo and behold, amidst the Force Field's Bizzarre Love Triangle kaleidoscopes, Yayoi Kusama's psychedelic mirrors, and Liza McConnell's Diorama Obscura, there were three permanent Turrell instalations left over from his retrospective, which was shown there in 2002-2003. One of them was "Unseen Blue," which is a model of the Los Angeles "skyspace."

James is best known for the natural observatory he's building inside Arizona's Roden Crater. Hopefully, he'll finish it in his lifetime.

Rock Over Cali

2004-03-21T18:10:00.000-08:00

Thursday (3/18/04), Dizzee killed it at the Key Club, making worthwhile the interminable wait and the horrendous opening groups (Katie on the Procussions[??]: "Like a boy band doing hip-hop"). Poise, grace, wit and blip-toons, we knew our man Dizzee had. But damn! Freestyle acapellas, witty asides, and Kristal clear ownership of the stage at the alcohol-free age of 18? "Everybody in the club get tipsy"? Hell, yeah! "When I was growing up and listening to records, I was dreaming of this place. Respect, LA!" Nah...respect to you, Rascal!

Friday (3/19/04), Franz Ferdinand and a whole other vibe at the Troubadour. Walking-talking industry bullshit machines, sloppily dribbling hype all over you every time you walk through the "someone call the fire department" over-crowd. Thank God for the music. The Franz are four mediocre-looking Scottish lads (best of the bunch, guitarist/keyboardist Nick McCarthy looks like a Commotion) creating master-Strokes of rocked-up dance-pop. Damn good hooks - intros, outros, bridges, bells and whistles -- and ex-Yummy Fur drummer Paul Thomson gets this year's Clem Burke award for making disco out of not disco.

Jail Guitar Doors, CA

2004-03-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

The new head of California's Department of Corrections (160,000 perps and still growing) is a woman. An iron-fisted, lace-gloved sign o' the times thinks you? Think again. Jeanne Woodford, the outgoing warden of San Quentin, is the rare modern jailer who believes in rehabilitation. And no less a tough-on-crime demagogue than Governator Hummer chose her to run his prisons. With one eye on the brutal budget, and another on the $30k that each inmate costs annually, Ahnold's view presents a double vision that might make social conservatives dizzee. Chancing a liberal ideal to save some dough -- it's about time. Cause the stat that jumped out of David Sheff's good-hearted profile of Woodford in the Times Magazine was that America's prison population has quadrupled in the last "20-odd years." Liberty and justice for all indeed.

Weather Reporting

2004-03-17T00:20:00.000-08:00

Woke up about 7 this morning to a fog sitting on the rooftops outside my living room window. The bright light white with earth and ocean steam, and me naked, agape. Never thought about fog hanging out in sunny Southern California. Apparently it's a respected local, a common topic of discussion on the atmospheric science circuit. In the mid-century – probably around the time someone noticed car emissions in the area left a heavy air-print-- scientists started studying fog in the LA basin, wondering where it comes from. Conclusion: most of it is sea fog, some radiation fog (not as bad as it sounds: a mix of warm ground and moist air), some advection fog (warm, moist air, cold ground). San Francisco's trademark, it's la LA's too, sharing as they do the jagged topography and Pacific influences. Kate says that the hills are alive with it during the seasonal temperature change, visibility = 30 feet. Finding it unexpectedly was like nature's gentle velvet-y slap that this is not your memory's urban area.

By the way, this is the land of the Pacific Decadal Oscillations, El Niño and La Niña, two cycles in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) weather patterns.

Mersh Haze: The billboard at the corner of Sunset and Fairfax has been officially identified as owned by Capitol Records. In seven weeks, a trifecta: picture of the roster (Grammy mammies - Radiohead conspicuously missing), Kylie, now Vines. Does the Strip begin here? Do different labels barter for it?

City Scenes & Phrases I

2004-03-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

"...Los Angeles, a lovely city of sun and sex, a Spanish discovery of Mexican misery, a star land of little men and lithe women slidding in and out of convertibles in tense tight pants."
- Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (Esquire 1966)

"A New York Minute is the time between the light turning green and the guy behind you honking."
- T.T. Wiley, NYC Traffic Commissioner (1950)

Two LA Artists

2004-03-03T17:39:00.000-08:00

Going to art in this town isn't as easy as simply making your way to "Chelsea Galleries" or "Upper East Side Museums." That's a good thing. Because it forces you to act on your instinct for art consumption, rather than just being omnivorous. Here, art palaces are spread all over (though there is a large confluence around West Hollywood, and along Wilshire). Bit by bit, Katie and I have been making our way through them -- but we've found that Saturday mornings are the only time that's good for both of us, and we've only taken advantage of a couple. Luckily, both proved revelatory (for me anyway), especially as both empasized LA artists.

Kerry James Marshall's show called Color Blind gave me a blow-to-the-head thrill with one tryptich. The show was made up of all new pieces, and most were uniformly simple--a fun-time exercise, spelling words out using colorful dots of oil, very 5th grade art-class. But within the context of the show, they seemed designed to be light morsels, because the three-part "Heirlooms and Accessories" was exactly the opposite. The three huge canvases contained, as a faint background, digitized prints of a single photograph, a lynching. In the foreground, were x-large, jewelled lockets, with photographs of three different white women, the frames and chains of each locket studded with rhinestones. There was little nuance, just an awakening slap and a flood of America's contrasting memories. Find this piece, if you can.

Then, at the Craft & Folk Art Museum we saw a group-show called Fade 1990-2003: African American Artists in Los Angeles. Sure enough, the first piece I saw here was Marshall's too, five mounted white dinner plates with slogans like "Black Is Beautiful" and "We Shall Overcome" on them. There was also a number of great other pieces, including Dennis Olanzo Callwood's photograph tombstones for Long Beach Latino gang kids (in hand-made, graffitti-addled frames) and Alison Saar's folk-artsy baseball bats with bust carvings in them. Yet all were topped by five photographs called the Arson Series, by Roland Charles (1944-2002), founder and director of Black Photographers of California, Inc. The photographs are of a single church after a fire, but where the images should be of destruction, the natural light Charles bathes them in, is all about survival and rebirth. It helps that he's photographing musical instruments. Kind of amazing that in this day and age, Charles' name is hard to come by on the WWW. (There was another piece to Fade, exhibited elsewhere, that I did not see--both were reviewed by the LA Weekly.)

2004-02-11T20:48:00.000-08:00

Like losing one's virginity or the first drink of a sweet stumble towards alcoholism, one's inaugral Green Room experience should be documented with appropriate bruises and deeply hidden scars, I believe. So, yeah, there's a couple of things I won't forget about going to see Dizzee Rascal make his American TV debut on the Jimmy Kimmel Show last night. But comparitively speaking, the horrors were pedestrian. To wit: the Hollywood entertainment machine may be even less classy than I imagined. The hype man was a leering, unshaven, overweight late-thirties pig in a wrong-colors Padres hat, who thought humor meant ogling girls 10-15 years younger than he was, calling them "floosies" and "saucepots," and wondering if he can come off the stage and spank them. Is it any wonder he was appearing at the Comedy Store later in the evening, for free? Then there was Jimmy, settling a visibly schvitzing Dizzee during the commercial break by also invoking the Rascal-mania nubiles - many of them Spectre radio promo girls - saying "Dizzee, these are American girls - they will sleep you with you after the performance." Thankfully, Dizzee gave him a look that said "Wanker, can I just get through this?" Oh, they also ran out of the good beer -- and the salmon on the crackers was dried. But this simply makes the Kimmel Show caterers culinary savages and mediocre hosts; it won't monopolize my time in therapy. Now, on the other hand, seeing a respected NYTimes music crit looking porn star-rific in a beige leather blazer and platform shoes ...

On the positive tip: Dizzee's "Fix Up Look Sharp" was live and direct, with many lines thrown towards Kimmel and LA, and thus a high cheese factor but there certainly was nothing sculpted about it. Back in the GR afterwards, there was a great Music 2003 Kodak moment: Yeah Yeah Yeah Nick Zimmer and Dizzee in a short conversation. "Remix!" in either direction. Dizzee's DJ was a very nice, large English dude who goes by the name of Marga Man - told me he's got a new record coming out in the fall on XL, and described it as "comedy, like Eminem."

2004-02-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

In which a life-long New Yorker records his thirty-something Los Angeles experience. Here, then, are the sounds and the images, the wrongful biases and the spot-on preconceptions, tales of scaling life's monument and anecdotes of slouching towards complacency. God help me if I get pulled over.