by Nick Stillman on January 13, 2011
It’s 1992. A lead singer with a blond mane breezes into a glassy building and strides toward the elevator, clicking his teeth in time to a beat. He’s a tall, clean-shaven guy with tattoos and broad shoulders. His chiseled facial features are flourished with makeup, but he’s not in disguise. Just the opposite. He crosses the lobby clamorously, necklaces and earrings clanging, leather clapping against leather. The echoes of his stiletto-heeled boot steps announce his presence. Unconsciously, he reaches a gloved hand to his crotch. Yes, his leather pants are cinched tight. Two of his band’s singles have charted as high as number 2. Their last album reached number 7 on the Billboard 200 in 1990, and its initial single is a testament to his heterosexuality, so he couldn’t give a fuck what people are whispering about his leather pants and eyeliner. The band has already recorded a follow-up album, which will be their third. He’s riding a beer buzz. He has no idea that he’s living his last minute on top of the world.
by Darcy Tell on December 02, 2010
Through repetition, the facts of Galka Scheyer’s story have taken on an air of inevitability: she has come down to us as a kind of Weimar Auntie Mame engaged in a fool’s errand to promote modern German art in philistine America. That she left the first collection of first-rate modern art in California seems almost accidental.
by Catherine Corman on November 04, 2010
In 1930, as the film East of Borneo was being made, a team of scientists descended on the remote volcanic island of Niuafo'ou to view an eclipse. Joseph Cornell, an avid stargazer who kept dossiers on constellations and heavenly bodies and subscribed to at least one journal of astronomy, was likely aware of this expedition.
by Quinn Latimer on October 13, 2010
Los Angeles has long been an urban dialectic par excellence, with its discordant melodies and apparent contradictions; its extreme polarities of nature, of culture, of economics, of politics. The metaphors come easily—the tropical flower abloom in a desert basin, the city of illusions, etc.—and Bertolt Brecht employed them acidly and exactingly in the poems he wrote during his LA exile in the 1940s.
by Jon Leon on October 11, 2010
I'm lying in a waterbed. On the glass-topped table next to me: the journal of Alix Roubaud and a gun. I haven't touched the gun, I haven't read the book. I'm listening to "Roses" by White Ring. I feel like I'm overdosing on Nicorette. I spit the gum into a champagne flute and pick up Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Ellis. I read 3 pages, and then I read 3 pages from Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, and then I wander the apartment, kind of dazed, and put in a DVD of Dawn of the Dead.
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