Rachel Kushner and Laura Owens

RECENTLY I spoke to novelist Rachel Kushner, whose The Flamethrowers is far and away among the most celebrated novels of the year, and artist Laura Owens, whose recent show of recent paintings in her own Boyle Heights space reminds us why she became the youngest artist to have a career retrospective at the MOCA.

The two -- longtime friends and aesthetic allies -- talked about their own work, their respect for each other, and their hopes for the future. The story, HERE, is from Pasadena magazine, now helmed by my former LA Times editor, the mighty Maria Russo.

Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers"

ONE of our favorite debuts in recent years is Rachel Kushner's Telex From Cuba. I was aware of this novel only because of a tip from New York literary agent Chris Calhoun, and once I read the galleys I was a bit abashed to see what a substantial talent was here in my city, until then invisible to me.

In any case, Rachel is invisible no more. Here sophomore novel, The Flamethrowers, which came out this week, is drawing rave reviews in the US and UK, and enthusiastic coverage, including an NPR interview I have not yet heard. The new novel is about speed, sex, motorcycles, Italy, '70s New York and the art world (a few of our favorite things.)

So far, it seems to me even better than the Cuba book. (She explored some of the themes in her book in a recent review of Richard Hell's new memoir in the New York Times Book Review.)

The New Yorker's James Wood calls it "scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice." Dwight Garner just wrote one of his characteristically electric reviews of the novel.

HERE is my interview with Rachel from a few years ago. I recently met with the Echo Park resident at a groovy nearby cafe (braving the treacherously steep Baxter to get there), and have another story on the author and her work coming soon. Until then, pick up The Flamethrowers.

Can Unions Save the Creative Class?

SALON is running a series on labor unions in the 21st century. My contribution is a piece asking if struggling artists, musicians, authors, scribes, etc. can make use of a union or collective to negotiate these strange times.

I spoke to a number of folks -- a laid-off journalist, a music historian, screenwriter who helped lead the Hollywood writers strike, cultural observer Thomas Frank -- for this piece. And took the whole thing back to about the 12th century. Complicated issue.

Here it is.

Modern Architecture in LA

WHEN people think about LA urbanism, they still invoke the same old cliches -- Woody Allen's line about the only "cultural advantage" being a right turn on red, the notorious "sprawl," and so on. They recite Getrude Stein's line about "no there there" (applied originally to another California city) as if the early town fathers just sort of forgot that part.

So it was refreshing to hear from two Getty curators, who I spoke to last week about the place's new architecture initiative, that the sins and glories of LA were all pretty much planned out a century ago.

(I got very pumped up talking these guys about our bold, unconventional metropolis -- and then as I got on the 405, realized what an absolute disaster LA can be sometimes.) 

Here is my LA Times piece on the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture, and the inaugural show, Overdrive. (There will be a lot in the press on this over the next few months.) It is a sequel of sorts to its (much larger) initiative on postwar art in L.A.

The first press conference was at the Capitol Records tower, and the Getty seems to be rolling this out in style. What I wonder is, with all the work done on LA modernism -- by everyone from the Conservancy's Modern Committee to DnA radio host Frances Anderson to architectural historian Alan Hess -- can the Getty, which spent years basically ignoring LA and contemporary culture, add anything to the continuing story?

Looking forward to finding the answer to that question over the ensuing weeks and months.

The Long Shadow of John Cage

ONE hundred years ago today, a child was born in Los Angeles who would go on to... well, what exactly was Cage's impact anyway? I've been trying to figure that out since I studied experimental music at Wesleyan two decades ago.

Whatever it is, part of what interests me about Cage is how his influence -- ideas like indeterminacy, his reworking of certain Asian ideas including the Tao, prepared instruments that extended the innovations of Henry Cowell -- reached outside classical or experimental music. He even inspired, albeit briefly, the Beatles.

In this story, from Sunday's LA Times, I speak to a wide range of artists, including Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields and Mac from Superchunk, about the composer's long reach.

Here's what performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, who knew Cage a bit in New York in the '50s, told me about him:

His presence was peculiar – unlike anyone else’s. He was always either smiling and laughing – or extremely serious. Nothing in between.

Frenchman at Neutra's House

RECENTLY I was invited to architect Richard Neutra's old house in Silver Lake to check out the "intervention" by the French artist Xavier Veilhan, who created a number of sculptures to refer to the pioneering modernist's life and work.

The press events and opening were quite groovy -- movie stars, French people, music by a member of the French band Air.

Los Angeles' Silver Lake, of course, is arguably the best neighborhood in the country for modernist domestic architecture. (That's even if you don't count Silverlake Wine and Rockaway Records.)

Here is my story. The work is up for a few more weeks. And in my years of paying attention, Neutra's VDL House -- still not perfect -- has never looked better.

True Eclecticism with Wild Up

ONE of the oddest and most beautiful concerts I've been to this year took place at the Hammer Museum a few weeks ago.

Here's a bit of what was on offer as the museum and the musician's collective wild Up (they don't cap the "w") came together:

The fruit of this union was a July concert that began with a conductor in a cowboy hat, a menacing toreador, the sound of tumbleweed being rolled through the museum's courtyard, and the twangy strains of Ennio Morricone's music for Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns.

By the end of the afternoon, the group had launched ping-pong balls into the air in a tribute to minimalist composer LaMonte Young, and offered a meditative, early-music version of Katy Perry's "California Gurls," accompanied, as it happened, by helicopter in a particularly delicate passage. This was not the only place where the city seemed to be conflicting with – or filling out – the group's music: What police sirens smashed through a song by indie-rock heroes Magnetic Fields, and what sounded like a fire truck roared through the climax of a gnarly early Schoenberg piece.

HERE is my story on the group, which has a concert at Schoenberg Hall this Saturday and a lot of stuff, at the Hammer and elsewhere, through December. I speak to Hammer curator Elizabeth Cline and the group's conductor, Christopher Rountree.

Very much looking forward from more from these guys...

Culture and Criticism

TWO of my favorite journalists, film critic A.O. Scott and media reporter David Carr, have gone back and forth about a number of important issues lately. Some of this is analog vs. digital, print vs. Internet stuff.

Some of it has to do with the nature of the press, of DIY/artisanal culture, or the revival of vinyl records. And in this swirl of new and old, they ask, what is the role of the culture critic?

(Cue chin-stroking music, please.)

I wrote about a fading golden age or arts criticism a few years back, in a story -- eventually titled "Critical Condition" -- that drew so many letters, pro and con, that the LA Times added a Sunday letters page to contain them. Norman Lear responded to the article in a speech. That kind of thing.

My piece tried to look back, and to speculate on what was coming next. Here it is.

I'd like to think that what it said has held up pretty well, and that things are, if anything, bleaker than I forecasted at the time. How have things changed since then?

Collecting the Creative Class

MY recent stories on the struggles of the creative class have hit some people hard -- I've gotten more emotional responses from these, I think, than anything I've written in two decades as a cultural journalist. 


(Due to the mean-spirited, anonymous nature of Internet culture, I've also gotten nastier comments than I expected, along with some smaller doses of smart, reasonable criticism.)


In roughest terms, my stories take different angles to look at the same problem -- the decimation of the creative class, which includes artists of all kinds as well as the people who distribute and assess their work -- in recent years due to digital technology, the recession and changing values.


In any case, as I dig deeper into the issue, I wanted to make all of these pieces available to interested readers. Here's the series, so far, in total.

The creative class is a lie

The dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead. The media is melting. Blame the economy -- and the Web

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/singleton/

Why “branding” won’t save the creative class

Freelance work -- and a strong "brand" -- will never beat a job. Free agency's nice -- but so is health insurance

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/why_branding_wont_save_the_creative_class/singleton/

Does culture really want to be free?

Are new media companies "digital parasites"? The author of "Free Ride" tells Salon piracy is killing art

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/01/does_culture_really_want_to_be_free/singleton/

The clerk, RIP

The clerk has been killed by the economy, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon. Computers might want your creative job next

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/18/the_clerk_rip/singleton/

The architecture meltdown

One of the coolest creative-class careers has cratered with the economy. Where does architecture go from here?

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/04/the_architecture_meltdown/singleton/

No Sympathy for the Creative Class

Taxpayers bail out Wall Street and Detroit. But there's no help, or Springsteen anthem, for struggling creatives

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/22/no_sympathy_for_the_creative_class/singleton/




Steal This Album:
What happens if no one pays for music?


http://www.salon.com/2012/06/20/steal_this_album_what_happens_if_no_one_pays_for_music/

My Studio 360 appearance: 

All of my Salon pieces: 

The Roots of Tony Bennett

THIS week my Influences column looks at the great crooner Tony Bennett. I figured that his Italian background and Frank Sinatra were important to him, but I was surprised to hear Leonardo da Vinci and Art Tatum, the most ornate and technically accomplished pianists in the history of jazz, as major inspirations. (His Sinatra anecdote, by the way, is one of my favorite things I've heard this year.)

HERE is that piece.

And we didn't have room for his words on painter John Singer Sargent -- here they are.


I have been painting and drawing all my life and studying the great masters but my all time favorite painter is John Singer Sargent. I have always felt that art should be about truth and beauty and for me, Sargent represents the perfect mix of that approach.  His portraits are gorgeous, but he still keeps the humanity of the person he is painting in mind and doesn't over-glorify the subject.   


Bennett will be in Orange County at the Segerstrom Center Saturday night.


Interesting at least to immediate family: My paternal grandfather, Sammy Timberg, who was a vaudevillian and later a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, landed songs with some of the greats, including Sinatra, but always pined to get Bennett to sing one of his, and never did. (I try not to hold that against either of them.)

The Creative Class: Idle Dreamers

THE latest of my series for Salon on the damage the recession, digital technology and the Internet have exerted on the creative class runs today. I'm consumed with the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend but will try to post on it more extensively later.

This piece looked at the crisis and said, Why aren't we hearing about it? Why has it not entered the cultural conversation? And why do is our first gut reaction that artists and creative types are, as one of my sources puts it, idle dreamers?

I'll just say this one required the most work, the most research and I think has the most depth and sweep. HERE is the new piece.

Remembering Artist Mike Kelley

THIS ended up being one of the toughest stories I've written in a long time, emotionally or otherwise. The assignment to track down friends and associates of Mike Kelley, the longtime Los AngelesaArtist who -- it's thought -- killed himself at his South Pasadena home a few weeks ago -- almost broke me. People close to someone who's died are always tender; after a suspected suicide, it's even more difficult for an outsider to get a rounded sense of a subject.


It's difficult simply to say what Kelley's art looked like: Did he do installations? Paint? Was his work rumpled and messy, or were his lines clean? Was he about sculpture, or film? We could probably say that Kelley's work was as far as possible from the serene, sensual, and pop products of the '60s generation -- Ruscha, Irwin, and so on -- but beyond that, it's hard to define what he did visually: Kelley's work was more idea-driven, and wide ranging in terms of form, than almost anyone I can think of. 


My piece, "Losing Faith," from the April Los Angeles magazine, is HERE. I knew Kelley entirely through his work, but I got the picture of an extremely magnetic, intellectually rigorous and deeply funny character. (Some of this comes across in the art; some of it doesn't.) Here is a link to some Kelley on PBS's Art21. (He's of course best known in indie circles for the cover of Sonic Youth's Dirty.)

His old friend, poet Amy Gerstler, was important in giving me a sense of the artist as a young man. “I wouldn’t say I saw it coming,” she said of his death. “I was completely shocked and horrified. But he had a lot of pain in him. From childhood. We were lucky we had him for so long.”


Filmmaker John Waters, who collects Kelley’s work and knew him as a funny guy who didn’t suffer fools, was startled as well.  “To me his work always satirized depression,” Waters told me. “All that stuff about recovered memory, building his childhood home to travel around… I thought it was something he had when he was younger, that he was commenting on it. I always thought that his humor would save him.”


Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art

Playwright Donald Margulies in the Southland

RECENTLY, I had the good fortune to spent part of the day strolling through the Orange County Museum of Art's Richard Diebenkorn exhibit. This enchanting show of the California painter's Ocean Park paintings was even better because I took it in with a trained painter who could point out what I might have overlooked. That this former artist was the New York/New Haven playwright Donald Margulies made the afternoon even more delicious.

Diebenkorn's Ocean Park, No. 129

The playwright was in the OC for a revival of his play Sight Unseen -- which South Coast Repertory developed and premiered 20 seasons ago. David Emmes, company co-founder, directs, this time around, this play about a Brooklyn painter who's visiting England at a moment of both triumph and doubt. My story is here.

Margulies -- whose plays specialize in deeply uncomfortable tales of the creative class -- turned out to be very good company. He talked about giving his students Eric Fischl paintings to spark writing a scene, and asks them to write a monologue from the point of view of a Diane Arbus portrait.

South Coast Rep, Costa Mesa

And I can't say anything more about this publicly, but I'm quite eager to see his work with HBO on an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex bear fruit.

The Roots of a Polymath: Lars Jan

FOUNDER of the Los Angeles avant-gartde performance group Early Morning Opera, Lars Jan is a polymath interested in a lot of things, especially our era in which screens of various kinds have infiltrated both public and private spaces.

We spoke about the age of the screen, as well as some of his artistic models -- everyone from Gerhard Richter to Fellini -- for my Influences column. Here is that piece:  This ended up being an intriguing discussion.

Jan's new piece, Abacus -- which he just premiered at Sundance -- comes to REDCAT next week.

Pacific Standard Time: The Gallery Scene

ANOTHER bit of catching up here: My latest article concerns the art galleries that made Los Angeles an important center for contemporary art in the years before the LACMA opened. I looked primarily at three gallery owners -- Irving Blum of Ferus, Virginia Dwan and Riko Mizuno.

The late, great Wallace Berman

HERE is the story, which due to the Times' layout looks like it is almost entirely a correction. (It's not.)

It's notable, of course, that two of these key figures were women, especially given how macho the LA art world was in the first few postwar decades. (Ferus included.) Here is a page about a show at Crossroads School about woman gallerists in the '60s and '70s.

Some of these themes will be part of a West Hollywood branch of Pacific Standard Time called It All Started Here.

Introducing Pacific Standard Time

IT'S finally happened. After a lot of talk, the postwar art blowout Pacific Standard Time has opened at dozens of museums and spaces across Southern California.

Your humble blogger wrote a piece for Los Angeles magazine about the origins, offerings and meaning of the whole thing -- it includes a dozen recommended shows, from the Getty's overview, Crosscurrents, to a show of swimming pool photography in Palm Springs. Here's an image that describes what I liked about this period:

Walter Hopps, the curator-genius who steered the gallery in its radical early days, originally supported his art habit by working as a psych-ward orderly. Kienholz lived, as he put it, “on the fringes of society, like a termite,” so poor that he bartered a painting for the removal of an aching tooth. Irwin made his money winning dance contests—the lindy mostly—and betting on horses. Billy Al Bengston was so broke that he couldn’t afford a battery for his car: The art school dropout parked his ’37 Pontiac facing downhill, nose toward the Malibu surf, so he could roll-start it.


Here's something art critic Dave Hickey just told the New York Times:

Wildman Ed Kienholz

“It’s corny,” said Dave Hickey, an art critic and a professor in the art and art history department at the University of New Mexico. “It’s the sort of thing that Denver would do. They would do Mountain Standard Time. It is ’50s boosterish, and I would argue largely unnecessary.”


You be the judge.

Pacific Standard Time's Life and Times

WE'RE getting close to the launch of a gargantuan art blowout -- much bigger than an exhibit, not as cheesy as a "celebration" -- called Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945 to 1980. This will be a six month initiative involving museums and galleries from Santa Barbara to San Diego, Santa Monica to Palm Springs.

For Sunday's LA Times I put together a timeline intended to be helpful in orienting interested parties. I hope it's a good read too and tells part of the story of this remarkable state. The chronology -- HERE -- tracks things from the work of Salvador Dali's (right) with Hitchcock, through Ed Ruscha and the Ferus Gallery and the Watts Towers (above), up to the presidential election of Ronald Reagan.

I'll be writing more about Pacific Standard Time: Please stay tuned.

MOCA's "Art in the Streets"

THE other day I belatedly made it over to the Museum of Contemporary Art for its celebrated -- and blockbuster -- Art in the Streets show. I can't remember longer lines for a museum show; maybe Murakami or something.

Overall, this seemed to me a strong and engaging show. If anything it was perhaps too large and complete, in its commandeering of the entire Geffen Contemporary space and aiming to tell the history of graffiti, skateboard culture, tagging, hip hop and related phenomenon from the early '70s to the present. (As you'd hope from a show at a Los Angeles museum, the West Coast was not entirely overlooked, as it sometimes is in histories of contemporary art. But see below.)

The volume at times was overwhelming, with some parts verging on theme park, but mostly this was a well balanced and at times exciting show. I especially enjoyed the display of schooled artists inspired by street art -- the Juxtapoz crowd -- which included Barry McGee and the late Margaret Kilgallen. (Two of California's greatest artists of my generation; LACMA, during an earlier regime, both commissioned and later destroyed some of their work.)

So with all this popular, rad, exuberant and accessible street art, why do I feel a bit uneasy about the whole thing? Part of it is that I'm smelling the acrid scene of hype. LA Times critic Christopher Knight got at some of my misgivings in an provocative essay that I fear will be overlooked because of its appearance on Memorial Day weekend.

His Sunday essay argues that MOCA's claims that street art is "the most influential art movement since Pop" is "overblown." Here's Knight: 

"Art in the Streets" cites global reach, including London; São Paolo, Brazil; Athens; and Tokyo, as evidence. (Sixty artists are surveyed.) Since the 1970s, however, the deepest impact on art culture has come from Conceptual art, not graffiti.

Conceptualism is the primary lingua franca of art today — like it or not, and for good or ill. 

Knight has other problems with the show, including some artists he considers overlooked (I wrote about LA artist Gajin Fujita here) and an issue familiar to West Coast culture vultures:

Mostly MOCA tells a mythic tale in which graffiti, an Expressionist art form, is largely born in Manhattan, spreads across the country and finally envelopes the world. If the story sounds familiar, that's because it replays New York School legend, long since discredited, about Abstract Expressionist painting in the 1940s. 

Another sour note: We've all been complaining for years that museums build their exhibits around their gift shops; British street artist Banksy even has a film called Exit Through the Gift Shop. 

But this may be the first show I've seen in a long time -- and I've been going to big exhibits in London, New York, D.C. and LA for more than 20 years -- where you are basically forbidden to go into the gift shop. At least, that's the way it seemed when my wife and son walked into the museum store and I, lagging along by a few feet so I could reed a wall label, was kept out because the shop had reached capacity. Soon a substantial line had built up, and the museum lost both my loyalty and the $20 or $30 I might have spent on a book. (If the guard had been less rude it would have pissed me off less.)

In conclusion, despite some mixed feelings about the genre and the exhibit itself, this show did a lot to win me over. Knight excepted, I don't seem to be alone here. My four-year-old son -- who is by now all too familiar with museum shows -- reclined on the bean-bag chairs in the theater showing Spike Jonze's inventive skateboard videos and offered, "Dis is da life!!"

And who can argue with that?

Martha Graham vs. Isamu Noguchi

TWO very different artists -- with equally contrasting temperaments -- enjoyed one of the richest collaborations of the 20th century. They were also shaped in some ways by their time in California.

Graham with Bertram Ross

Dance pioneer Martha Graham and sculptor/ designer Isamu Noguchi worked together for more than two decades on about two dozen sets; three of them, including Pulitzer-winning Appalachian Spring, will be staged in Orange County this weekend. HERE is my LA Times piece on these two figures.

These SoCal performances have an additional resonance: Noguchi was born in Los Angeles (and will be the subject of a Laguna Art Museum retrospective opening in June) and Graham spent an important part of her teenage and young adult years in Santa Barbara and L.A. 

Graham talked about the vast expanses of the West as given her ballets a greater sense of space.  And life on the West Coast had a more temperamental effect as well.

A contemplative Noguchi

“My people were strict religionists who felt that dancing was a sin,” she told Dance Magazine. “”They frowned on all worldly pleasures…. But luckily we moved to Santa Barbara, California,” when she was 14. “No child can develop as a real Puritan in a semitropical climate. California swung me in the direction of paganism, though years were to pass before I was fully emancipated.”

And here is a video of Appalachian Spring.

"Common as Air"

THE scholar and poet Lewis Hyde is a fascinating figure whose ideas about the unease of art in a market economy have developed him a cult following that includes figures like Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon and artist Bill Viola. (David Foster Wallace was also a big fan.)

Hyde's most famous and influential book -- with the possible exception of Tricker Makes the World -- is The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern Word. His new book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, is, says Gary Giddins in the new Bookforum, similar:

"It too, is concerned with creativity, sharing and communal property; it, too, is repetitive and larded with academic setups; it, too, peters out (Hyde has no gift for climax); and it, too, is indispensable."

I spoke with Hyde when the 25th anniversary of The Gift was released. I found him a very smart guy though I don't agree with him completely: We discussed the ideal bohemia, market triumphalism, and the marketplace friendly art of Andy Warhol. Here it is.