L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Within the past five years two all-male bands have covered the ire-raising, too-sweet-for-comfort single by The Crystals, “He Hit Me (And it Felt Like a Kiss).” Carole King and Gerry Goffin purportedly wrote the song after learning singer Little Eva had been beaten, multiple times, by her boyfriend, though Eva claimed the[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Miles Davis wasn’t interested in Flamenco dancers or their music. Maybe it was too frilly, too foreign, too feminine to enter his orbit. Whatever the reason, Frances Taylor, the first Mrs. Miles Davis, set out to change his mind. She’d been to Barcelona and fallen for the sexy Spanish sounds and wanted[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “It’s best to turn people on. The hippies were always talking about being turned on,” said artist Dan Graham, speaking on a panel at the Museum of Contemporary Art two years ago. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, his co-panelists, had been his downstairs neighbors before they became Sonic Youth. They’d introduced him[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Sometimes, an artist strikes a chord with his contemporaries, and affection for him ripples through culture more distinctly and effusively than anything he’s actually made. Paul Thek was that kind of artist, perhaps better suited to being a muse than to having one. Homages began coming his way before he’d cleared thirty-five[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “I believe we were born dead,” said motorcyclist-daredevil Evel Knievel, rambling to Sports Illustrated in 1968. He’d just cleared 16 cars in Gardena, CA, before crashing over the fountains at Cesare’s Palace, and was romanticizing about future stunts. “I have accepted the fact that dying is a part of living,” he continued.[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley People dress for commencement everywhere, but in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the effort seems more concerted than it has at other graduations; I imagine the girl in the Birkenstocks with the frayed cotton skirt and matching cardigan thought as hard about her look as the woman in sage, Grace-Kelly style satin and patent leather[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child,” Norman Mailer infamously remarked in 1971, less than one year before Arbus died and over nine years after she snapped a photo of a scrawny blond boy who actually did have grenade in hand.[…..]
