It’s a typical Saturday night, the drinks are flowing and the music is playing - as I lie in the bathtub reading another David Goodis novel, sipping another tequila and soda, with a Brahms piano sonata playing softly in the next room. I’m in my natural element,...
A Poem
The trail you blazed was a well-worn path. Narcissistic heroics, with one eye on posterity. Until the time rolled around to reverse into the antithesis of what you once so convincingly pretended to be: stripped of the trappings of excess, climbing the twelve steps on...
Not Bad: A Michael Jackson play, For the Love of a Glove
More than a re-imagining of the Michael Jackson story, Julien Nitzberg’s play, For the Love of a Glove, serves as a point of departure for a wildly surreal take on an already bizarre life, from the troubled entertainer’s repressed childhood in Gary, Indiana, to the...
Rain & Creativity in Dublin
Located in the heart of Dublin’s Liberties district, the seven-story Aloft Dublin City hotel stands out in a gritty neighborhood of winding residential streets and old distilleries. The Liberties (the unusual place name results from this having been the only part of...
An Art Ramble with Top LA Dealer Jeffrey Poe
“You’ve caught me in a really good mood,” said Jeffrey Poe, as he sidled up to the bar of an upscale West Hollywood restaurant. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I was hoping to play up the ‘lonely at the top’ angle and find a backhanded way of comparing your...
LIFE AFTER ART
In order to kill time while waiting for John Waters to take the stage for a Conversation to celebrate the publication of his new book, Mr. Know-It-All, at the Renberg Theatre in Hollywood, I made the mistake of checking my phone. One email awaited me. It was from a...
The Battle of Forevermore
The Day of Forevermore, Marnie Weber’s first feature film, is the culmination of the artist’s long career as a weaver of macabre and otherworldly scenarios through art, film and music. Over the last 25 years Weber has created her own distinctive realm of avant-garde...
THE DEATH THAT WON’T DIE
I recently overheard somebody make the observation that David Bowie’s death has “staying power.” It sounded like an idiotic remark at first but in this case it seems accurate. Sure, Bowie was one of the greats, an unfading star who provided an exhilarating soundtrack...
TOTTENHAM CORNER
Ten years ago, when I learned of the existence of a film called Trona, shot in the desert hellhole of the same name, I feared the worst, especially when I learned that it was a thesis film by a CalArts graduate. It was hard to imagine anybody associated with that...
Mooned River: Matthew Barney
Where do you start with a six-hour operatic extravaganza on sex, art, alchemy, reincarnation and the decline of the American auto industry, drenched in melodrama and symbology, with so many threads running through it that the original material, if any, is obscured; a...
TOTTENHAM CORNER
There are few sights more ridiculous than a grown man wearing a pair of shorts. Back in my day, grown men simply did not venture outside clad in shorts. Anyone choosing to appear in public in such outlandish garb would be laughed off the streets. Scorn would...
Raymond Pettibon
Of late, I have been selling various valuable paper collectibles online. First to go were the early punk flyers and fanzines. Now it’s time to part with a collection of Raymond Pettibon limited edition “art zines,” as they are sometimes called on eBay. Despite being...
Tottenham Corner
Running the words “memory, narrative, perception, artist statement” into an Internet browser unleashes a veritable torrent of results. Take this: “I am interested in narrative, memory and the influence of place upon our perception of these topics.” And this: “Most of...
More Pricks than Kicks
I have often been encouraged to launch a Kickstarter campaign, but I have never been able to decide on a specific project that justifies urging potential donors to dig deep into their pockets on my behalf. There are so many Kickstarters these days and there is only so...
The Portlandization of Los Angeles
I had serious work to do, so I took a nap. After dragging it out for as long as possible, I rolled off the sofa and quickly went out, greatly in need of some revivifying fresh air, or air as fresh as it gets around here. Ten minutes later I walked into what passes for...
TOTTENHAM CORNER
A racetrack is being demolished, and guess what, it’s not the Arcadian showpiece nestled beneath the San Gabriel mountains but the track of lakes, flowers and paranoia in the heart of Inglewood, City of Champions. In recent years this inner city workingman’s track has...
Books: To (Richard) Hell and Back
Richard Hell swaggers up the side-walk, as if in a private movie that is being played out for the pleasure of others, as if he is being watched—which he is. Full of himself. Happy: yes, I suppose that’s another word for it. And why wouldn’t he be happy? He is about to...
Tottenham Corner
I awoke at dawn, fuming. I had been having a drink with an actor friend the night before when he dropped the news on me that his buddy, "Josh," whose latest movie he had appeared in, wanted to “do something.” “He’s a great guy,” I was assured, “very funny.” The bar we...