Awol – as you gentle readers may not have noticed – was a little more awol than usual the last week or so. Once upon a time that might have implied too many bars or after-hours clubs. Or piles of actual paid work (remember salaried employment?—once almost as...
It’s no secret to readers of this blog that awol’s location coordinates can occasionally be tracked to an opera house, whether in this city (the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, or more recently, across the street at Disney Hall), Long Beach, or further afield (which...
Our eyes are drawn to remnants and remains in recent years – the ancient, outmoded, rejected, the discarded; remnants of the industrial 19th century, the post-industrial 20th, even the proto-digital cyber age that preceded the present within the millennial memory...
One thing that came across in Jeff Koons’ recent Broad-sponsored (“Un-Private”) conversation with John Waters was a sense of the satisfaction Koons took from his work as a bond salesman and commodities trader on Wall Street. His fascination with commercial exchange...
As regular visitors to awol are familiar with by now, I tend to veer off the track a bit, linger a bit too long over this curiosity or that novelty (hopefully without pushing you all into a full-blown meditation – I assume you have your own facilitators for that), or...
Jim Jarmusch’s recent release, Only Lovers Left Alive, is not a successful film in the conventional sense; yet I wonder now whether I should cherish it all the more for that very reason. I think my chief complaint about it is that it’s not a successful script – which...
Mozart, like other great artists before and since, offers us a topological mirror in which to test and tease our perspectives on the universe and our fragile foothold in it. The evocative power of his greatest work is a sublime irony, felt all the more acutely as the...
Could there be such a thing as an orchestra of memory? A kind of color-organ (remember those?—no, of course you don’t; you’re too young) soundtrack of apprehension, clairvoyance, and the insight and deep vision of compressed years? (And how, after all, do we...
The big news yesterday was The Getty’s roll-out of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. (And you thought they were going to just let go of that franchise – after (let’s face it) lackluster performance and architecture modules? Not a chance.) ‘LA/LA’ stands for L.A.’s...
What makes a fair work? (Of any kind, really: a question out of Merchant Capitalism 101—or even Trade 101.) The merchants and the goods are key—by far the most important factor. But we’re not just talking about a marketplace, retail street or mall design – an...
After ten years, the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s Incognito benefit has become a fixture on the L.A. art world calendar; and although I don’t necessarily make it every year (the never-ending battle of time and distances, to say nothing of travel contingencies), I’m...
Paris Photo is in town; and although there are rumors afoot that it will be the last edition of the fair to be exported to Los Angeles, Deborah Vankin reports today in the Los Angeles Times that it will be back in 2015, to be paired alongside the French art fair, FIAC...
The 60th anniversary tour of the Paul Taylor Dance Company has provided an occasion for the revisitation or revival of a number of classic Taylor dances. I was just tempted to call them ballets; and the first of those programmed for Friday evenings performances,...
Before I was a child of Hollywood, the place, I was a child of Hollywood, the dream factory and its ancillary cultural machinery. That meant the movies first and foremost, whether experienced on the big screen at Radio City Music Hall or theatres and movie houses...
How will the end of the world play out? With a bang or a whimper? With mournful lamentation or furious dies irae? Vengeful and wrath-laden or becalmed? In paroxysms of grief or a hemorrhage of hilarity and hysteria? Well of course it will be all of these...
I wasn’t even sure I would be admitted to the room where most of the performance took place. There was a small throng gathered in the courtyard. Another part of the audience was already assembling in the Billy Wilder Theatre, where the performance would be...
From its troubled (I almost want to say stuttering) conception and creation, through its earliest publication – barely stitched together, edited, revised, corrected, re-edited – Melville’s Billy Budd is steeped in ambiguity – ambiguities integral to the dramatic and...
Was that a review I just read or did the snooze alarm go off again? The way they box up the art reviews in the Los Angeles Times, it’s sometimes hard to tell. The reviewer, Sharon Mizota’s focus seems to be on formula – which is not inappropriate here: the subject...
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