Bread and Bread

A month or so ago, I got invited to participate in an art show at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery called Chain Letter . You were probably invited too. As best I could tell, approximately twenty percent of the world’s population showed up at Bergamot Station this morning to unload their artwork. I guess that’s what happens when the premise of your show is “Invite ten people who will each invite ten people who will….” Pretty soon you get people like me, who aren’t even visual artists, making little collages. The next thing you know, it’s installation day and Cloverfield is backed up all the way to the 10. It was like an effing Dodger Game, or what the Glendale Galleria does to the 5 at Christmastime. And once I got to the actual gallery, it was pure Hollywood Forever. I immediately turned around, which tells you something about my commitment to visual art. I sent some of the people I invited—Sara, Pedro and Jennifer—mission-aborted texts. Suzanne actually made it in, so it will be...

Carmageddon —a.k.a. the shutting down of a ten-mile stretch of the 405 for two days, allegedly prompting a citywide traffic nightmare in a city that is already a daily traffic nightmare—is now old news to Angelenos, who collectively decided its effects were overhyped. Of course, it was hype that kept people off the roads and prevented what one writer called Sepulvedapocalypse. Never underestimate the power of fear as a motivator. Carmageddon was never exciting news to my four non-L.A. blog readers (shout-out to Tracy , Sizzle , Keely and Claire ), but whatever. I’m blogging about how I spent Carmageddon anyway. My strategy was basically to make people come to me. So arguably I cheated. A nobler carless weekend would have involved finally visiting one of the 75 galleries within a one-mile radius of my house, or taking public transportation. Instead, I: Stayed in Friday night and graded student reading journals while AK and Amy worked on a paper about dental care for poor children and re...

After seeing Midnight in Paris a few weeks ago—about a guy who romanticizes Paris in the 1920s—AK, Meehan and I tried to figure out what our own overly idealized Golden Ages would be. “There aren’t many eras when it would be good to be brown and queer,” AK pointed out. “Time traveling doesn’t work out well for me.” I remembered how, during my Little House on the Prairie phase, I wanted to travel back to pioneer times and buy a couple dozen acres of land for $5, like Pa did. I could do that with my allowance! But now I’m pretty sure washing one load of bonnets by hand in the river would cure me of any prairie lust. Saturday AK and I went to see Art In the Streets at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the first national exhibition of graffiti art, and I landed on my Golden Age: New York in the ‘80s. Wandering through the nooks and crannies of a huge multi-artist work that recreated not just graffiti art but the streets themselves—a sort of impressionistic playground of rundown shops and...

June was a special month: I only read one book, and I gave up on two. I’m usually really stubborn about finishing books, but I’m trying out this new fuck-you attitude. So I said a (respectful) fuck-you to The Sound and the Fury . I’m sure it was very original in its time, but I had to Google the plot to figure out what the hell was going on, and when my car’s CD player refused to play disc five, I decided that my car was performing an act of passive resistance. Who am I to argue with the literary tastes of a wise old Honda Civic? I did see a really good play this weekend, though: 100 Saints You Should Know at the Elephant Theatre . Written by Kate Fodor and discovered for us by Christine, it’s about a scholarly, uptight priest who decides he’s had enough of the theoretical God and longs for the more touchy-feely spiritual experience that comes from, well, actually touching other humans now and then (but not in a creepy way). Cheryl Huggins and Kate Huffman as the rectory cleaning lady...