In the early ’70s, during the couple of years before punk broke, one of the most exciting subcultural zeitgeists centered around a trio of novels—ostensibly sci-fi—written by former Playboy associate editors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, detailing the secret...
As the philosopher Lindsey Buckingham once observed “You win prizes if you stay, because that’s how we do it in LA.” When I landed in here in the very early ’90s, there were a number of local art legends who had been working the program for decades, yet seemed to have...
Until his suicide in 1995, Ray Johnson was one of those fringe artists that most artists had heard about, but very few were familiar with. Even then, it wasn’t until John Walter’s 2002 biopic How to Draw a Bunny—certainly one of the best biographical art documentaries...
Celebrity can be problematic. In fact, celebrity is one of the most poisonous influences on individual and collective human psychology at work in contemporary society, undermining the concept of individual creative autonomy as it unilaterally erases millennia-old...
I don’t remember when I first ran across Ad Reinhardt’s dazzling, sarcastic collage comics—probably in the ’80s (around the same time I stumbled upon his brilliant “Art is Art. Everything else is everything else” screeds, but before I saw his equally but oppositely...
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the weird inversions of mainstream and underground culture, particularly as regards formats—the vinyl record for example. Talking with Rick and Joe Potts and Dennis Duck (all founding members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society) on...
In 1968, Beatle Paul McCartney approached Richard Hamilton, inventor of Pop Art, to design the cover for the follow-up LP to the game-changing Sgt. Pepper album of the previous year. Hamilton came up with a typically droll and elegant solution by taking the opposite...
In retrospect, Machine Project—the Echo Park storefront operating for the last decade as a rapid-fire curatorial clearinghouse for founder/director Mark Allen’s tireless curiosity—would seem to have been one of the most influential artistic endeavors of the new...
The Los Angeles Free Music Society had its original heyday back in the 1970s, as much a dada and LSD-inspired piss-take on the high seriousness of experimental music—these were the days when Stockhausen was God—as a shaggy-dog extension of the Zappa/Beefheart/Wildman...
Ever since 1912, when Picasso and Braque first collaged actual newspaper clippings and trompe-l’oeil woodgrain fragments into the first Synthetic Cubist oil paintings, the confusion between mass media and fine art has been one of the central engines of contemporary...
UNDER THE RADAR Pearblossom Hwy MIKE OTT'S PEARBLOSSOM HWY REACHES for reality, in a real way, sort of. LA filmmaker's Mike Ott's last movie—LiTTLEROCK (2010) was a surprise smash in indie terms, racking up the kewpie dolls at LA's AFI Fest, indie fests in Boston,...
Mike Ott’s Pearblossom Hwy reaches for reality, in a real way, sort of. LA filmmaker’s Mike Ott’s last movie–LiTTLEROCK (2010) was a surprise smash in indie terms, racking up the kewpie dolls at LA’s AFI Fest, indie fests in Boston, Reykjavik, and Montreal and the...
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