When I was six or seven years old, Santa Claus brought my father an accordion for Christmas. He took it up in earnest, practicing long into the night. After he gave up trying to get better (which was quickly), he continued playing for a while, primarily out of a desire to irritate his family. Don’t [...]
Between Banksy’s recent visits and MOCA’s new exhibit, graffiti is sort of a thing right now in the Los Angeles art world. The ever-delightful PMCA is getting in on the action with their own graffiti exhibit, Street Cred: Graffiti Art from Concrete to Canvas. Unlike the MOCA show, the PMCA’s exhibit focuses on the graffiti [...]
If you fall into a certain age range and were fortunate enough to have musical education growing up, you undoubtedly had a music teacher who thought P.D.Q. Bach was just the cat’s pajamas. Which he is. P.D.Q., also known as (Johann) Peter Schickele, is a composer, comedian, and educator—think a more slapstick Victor Borge. Schickele [...]
What could be better than free admission to an excellent local museum on a beautiful Friday night? How about free admission to several excellent local museums. And to a bunch of other arts-oriented venues. And free shuttles running from stop to stop. And fancy food trucks. And live music. And did we mention it’s all [...]
It is hard to know precisely of what this event will consist. There will be music, we’ll wager—it’s called “Pianologues”—and probably some humorous rhetoric concerning the French and their foibles, and, it seems, an extended discussion of Babar, the industrious elephant king. Aside from biographical information, the entire description is as follows: “I AWOKE SUDDENLY, [...]
It’s that time of year again: home tour season. Really there are home and architectural tours all year round because after all this is Southern California and why not walk through strangers’ homes in any month you please, but there do seem to be a lot more of them around now, as spring slips into [...]
Rojelio Cabral, Comfortably Numb A, 2008, acrylic and aerosol on paper, 6.5’ x 11.5’, now showing at the PMCA. Les Figues Press is Los Angeles’s most prominent avant-garde publishing outfit. They put out plenty of cool books by cool people. They also do stuff with artists (as opposed to writers, though this is a distinction [...]
It’s an evocative name, Eichler. Beyond the suggestive Aryan acoustics, it calls to mind (for architecture buffs, anyway) the midcentury modern homes so synonymous with certain facets of the California lifestyle. Eichler was a developer who made a career out of bringing modern postwar architecture to the general public, through tract housing—the so-called Eichler homes [...]
You know that parking lot at the northeast corner of Union and El Molino? You’ve probably parked there to go to the Laemmle. It’s nice enough, as parking lots go. But it may not be around for much longer: There’s an initiative afoot to turn it into a park—a real park, with grass and trees [...]
NPR’s Joe Palca gets annoyed easily. He was so annoyed by Washington, DC in early 2009 that he decided to spend the summer at the Huntington, as the science writer in residence (he is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers). Then he wrote a book about it. It’s called Annoying: The [...]
