L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley In 1964 and 1965, Walter De Maria was the drummer for a band called the Primitives. Lou Reed, Tony Conrad and John Cale played in the band too, and the group would eventually morph into the Velvet Underground, after shedding and gaining key members and wholeheartedly embracing an addictive breed of nihilism.[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When she gives artist’s lectures, sculptor China Adams often describes her work as a race against her own death. Her smooth plaster “chunks” of ensconced trash, her vampiric experiments with blood consumption and her glass Vitrines filled with mummified possessions all attempt to preserve what’s bound to decay. But, while her work[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When they were newlyweds living in Switzerland, my grandparents met Terry Southern, the beatnik bad boy who would eventually co-write Easy Rider. My grandmother worked with Southern’s wife, Carol, at the United Nations nursery school in Geneva. Carol charmed her. “What a sport she was,” my grandmother remembers, “and a super gorgeous[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley The poet Frederick Seidel once received a death threat. It came via answering machine, in the form of a message left by a young woman. In a breathy voice, the woman said, “Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley A group called R.A.I.D. (Random Acts of Irreverent Dance) regularly performs at the Echoplex in Echo Park. They appeared at Bootie L.A., a monthly mash-up party, this past Saturday, wearing shimmering orange body-suits and making awkward movements that somehow still seemed organic. R.A.I.D. practitioners have all different sorts of bodies—beer bellies, jutting[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Orly Cogan is searching for the feminist beauty queen. Her strategy involves backtracking, returning to the same matronly craftiness embraced by members of Womanhouse a quarter of a century ago. That’s only sensible. Beauty queens and “the cutting-edge” do not go hand-in-hand. Case in point: this year’s freshly crowned Miss USA may[…..]
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[…..]
