L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley In the only photograph I have ever seen of her, Kajon Cermak looks omniscient. She is sitting in a white sedan and glancing sideways at something worthy of a half-smile. But only a half-smile. The main traffic reporter for the public radio station KCRW, Cermak has a been-there-done-that cool to her voice[…..]
Chrissie Hynde met her soul mate at a party hosted by Damien Hirst’s wife. Hynde, not a party person, had gone with a girlfriend out of a sense of obligation. When she realized she’d dropped in on a Congolese Art themed festival, replete with a Congolese barbecue, she headed straight to the bar. “Anyone who knows me knows exactly what I would think about that,”[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Craig Kauffman has a shoe fetish. He’s had it since he was a child. “My mom wore high heels,” Kauffman explained in a 2008 interview, the same interview in which he talked about the affect campy lingerie ads from Frederick’s of Hollywood had on his adolescent mind. (“Blow up bras, stuffed padded[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley The Arclight Theater in Hollywood feels like an AMC trapped in an Opera House’s body. It has bathroom attendants, assigned seating, a domed atrium and sweeping staircases (it has escalators too, but they’re hidden behind a partition). The oversized ticket I shared with four friends even promised no previews, though we found[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley In the new FX series Justified, a quick-to-draw marshal who wears a skin of coolness over his pent up anger nearly always shoots to kill. That’s the show’s conceit: at the end of each episode, someone is either shot dead or left alive by a carefully calculated hairsbreadth. The shootings are, of[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley A show with as defeatist a title as Permission to Fail should be anything but healthy. Yet “healthy” nicely describes Macha Suzuki’s unpretentious installation at Sam Lee Gallery. Stationed at the intersection between ambivalence and ambition, Permission to Fail rejects the fragmented nostalgia and aimless grandiosity that has infected too much recent[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Mika Rottenberg’s balmy, bizarre video, Mary’s Cherries, moves at such a comfortable pace that it almost convinces you of its normalcy. The three immensely able-bodied women in the video, dressed in Easter colors and stuck in homely cubicles, are completely unruffled as they transform manicured pink fingernails into equally manicured red maraschino[…..]
