L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley A friend of mine, a sculptor with immense brown eyes and a long figure that that always looks both cautious and comfortable with itself, was standing next to her brother’s Ford Explorer outside an Illinois gas station. They’d just been to see their grandfather in a rest home and it was the[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley I spent Sunday looking at boys. It began at LACMA, where I saw Catherine Opie’s quarterbacks, linebackers and surfers followed by Thomas Eakins’s rowers, wrestlers and athletic but stationary nudes. It continued at the Egyptian Theater, with ten of Andy Warhol’s four-minute screen tests: Buffy Phelps with delicate, defiant eyes and blondish[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “I remember thinking when I first saw a show of Jack Pierson’s that it looked like a group show–Jack’s photos, big letters, a desk. I was excited by this possibility,” wrote Eileen Myles, “that anyone might start to look like a group.” That the peripatetic Pierson–who’s like a travel photographer fixated on minutiae[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Because I don’t believe that big and bright equals beautiful, I am not a fan of West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center. A mammoth, reflective blue box that towers over the otherwise low-to-the-ground Melrose Avenue architecture, the PDC has more than its share of empty retail space. Inside, it often feels like a[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley In the spot filmmaker M. Blash created for Levi’s Jeans in 2009, Walt Whitman’s voice is like the Pied Piper’s pipe. “Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,” recites Whitman, played by an actor (an earlier Levi’s spot purportedly featured an actual recording of the poet). As[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley At the start of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote’s charming novella about a troubled socialite looking for “what’s hers” and attracted to everything that’s not, the unnamed narrator receives a message from a bartender named Joe Bell. He meets Bell, an old friend, and the two clandestinely talk about Holly, the socialite[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Hugh W. Diamond, a 19th century English psychiatrist, began using photography as a therapeutic strategy nearly as soon as photography existed. Diamond would photograph the mentally ill patients he worked with and then confront them with the resulting likenesses, confident that the radical power of reality would jar them into recognizing their[…..]
