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 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[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Billboards promoting HBO’s How To Make It In America began appearing in Los Angeles in January, or at least that’s when I began noticing them. They didn’t make sense because they weren’t any of the things billboards often are: explicitly sexy, youth-worshiping, polarizing, lush for no reason, symmetrical, centered, excessively air-brushed, heavy-handed,[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Josh Harris welcomed the new millennium from the basement of a New York bunker. He was surrounded by a posse of jumpsuit-clad creatives, and, at one point, all of them watched as a naked man whipped a barely dressed woman around underneath a running shower head. The scene made about as much[…..]
