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Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa (above), editors of Slake: Los Angeles -- the beautiful quarterly slab of essays, poetry, photography, fiction and reportage -- were once, respectively, deputy editor and editor-in-chief of this very paper. Now they're celebrating Slake's fourth issue, "Dirt," at the Last Bookstore with a "filthy" reading of pieces by Joseph Mattson, Luke Davies, Antonia Crane and Lauren Weedman.

Why "Dirt"?

JOE DONNELLY: As with our previous themes, we're attracted to the different layers of meaning in dirt. It connotes organic, messy, sexy, life and death, beginning and end, earthy, etc. And it's a return to our roots, get it? Roots are in the dirt. C'mon, it's sedimentary, my dear.

LAURIE OCHOA: Hey, you know that was my line! Come up with your own bad pun.

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Alissa Walker

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The wall seemed to materialize overnight.

Where once there was the pleasantly twee boutique, its offerings of Navajo blankets and denim shorts carefully staged like an anthropological survey of Silver Lake, now there was a cinder block bunker. A sheet of paper taped to the window confirmed the new tenant: A bar, or, rather, an expansion of a treasured restaurant that had been at the same corner for almost 15 years. Yet there was something ominous, something threatening. Some people -- even the same people who liked the restaurant -- did not like this wall.

For weeks, it was a topic of conversation in the neighborhood. At the coffee shop next door, regulars scowled over their lattes. At dinner parties around the reservoir, longtime residents shook their heads. By the time it reached the Internet, commenters were calling for boycotts of the restaurant. One night, four words in suspiciously impeccable penmanship appeared on the wall, articulating the local consensus: "Tear down this wall."

Gareth Kantner, owner of Cafe Stella and its cinder-block aspirations, defended his actions at a meeting last night in Silver Lake. According to a rendering he passed out to attendees, the cinder blocks would be covered by stucco (by last night they were already swabbed), painted blue and planted with bougainvillea. So why such a walled garden? "My patrons have told me they love their privacy," he said, with much conviction. But Cafe Stella already has a vast and quite private outdoor patio to serve those patrons. What about those of us who like a little neighborhood with our wine?

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Marissa Gluck

L.A. Times cartoonist Paul Conrad's Chain Reaction sculpture from 1991

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A controversy has been bubbling over Paul Conrad's anti-nuclear war sculpture in Santa Monica, Chain Reaction, and the latest fallout may spell the end of the 26-foot tall mushroom cloud near the city's Civic Center.

With the deterioration of the steel, fiberglass and copper sculpture, mostly due to the sea air and sun, Santa Monica's Arts Commission and Public Art Committee have recommended the city deaccession the five-and-a-half-ton piece rather than attempt to preserve it. Citing public-safety concerns, the city erected a temporary fence around the sculpture in June.

Installed in 1991, the sculpture was a gift to the city by the artist, paid for by an anonymous donor for $250,000. It was supposed to have been made of bronze, which tends to require little maintenance and resists the elements over time. Instead, the piece was constructed with a stainless steel internal frame, a Fiberglas core and copper tubing for the chain links.

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Craig Schwartz

CTG/Playwrights Horizons "pre-Broadway" run of "Clybourne Park" currently playing at the Mark Taper Forum

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Jaws have been dropping since the New York Post broke the story yesterday

​ that producer Scott Rudin was walking away from plans to produce Bruce Norris' Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Clybourne Park, on Broadway later this season. The blowup between the producer and the playwright-actor appears to have been retaliation for Norris' decision to walk away from a contracted agreement to appear in an HBO pilot being produced by Rudin based on Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections. This has got to be disheartening for the Playwrights Horizons cast and director (Pam MacKinnon) currently performing Clybourne Park in what was to be its pre-Broadway run at the Mark Taper Forum, whose artistic director, Michael Ritchie, holds out hope that other producers and investors can still be found to give Norris' excellent play its moment on Broadway.

Check out the local reviews of Clybourne Park and the play it's spun from, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, produced by Ebony Repertory Theatre. For the latest New Theater Reviews, click here. For this coming weekend's Stage Listings, go to the jump.

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Courtesy Mor Lovehours

Mike Kelley memorial on Tipton Way, photographed Wednesday afternoon

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Mike Kelley was "arguably" the most important L.A. artist of his generation, "arguably" the one who changed the world's perception of Los Angeles, even "arguably" the most important contemporary artist according to obituaries and remembrances published yesterday, after news of the 57-year-old artist's death, reportedly by suicide.

A subdued version of that argument -- over how much exactly Kelley mattered and why -- was playing out last night near 11 p.m. at the top of Tipton Way. There, in an abandoned driveway blocks from Kelley's home in Highland Park, artists had begun to construct an unofficial, makeshift memorial.

"He was one of the main reasons I moved to L.A.," said painter Greta Svalberg. "He was a rebel, and he was famous."

"For me too," said artist Dani Ohana Tull, who lives nearby and had come to check on the candles. "After graduate school, it was either New York or L.A." Tull, who finished school in the early 1990s, had written down names of all the artists working here that interested him: Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Raymond Pettibon, Paul McCarthy. "This list of mavericks and freaks had an allure that seemed exotic," compared to New York.

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Ashley Marie Manzo/Taxidermy Her Bones

​When Ashley Marie Manzo was a child, her father took her to Necromance, the Melrose Avenue store filled with specimen jars, bones and macabre trinkets. She loved it, but many years had passed before she visited the store again. Then, three years ago, she returned to the shop.

"I fell in love with it all over again," says the up-and-coming artist from Boyle Heights.

Manzo bought a frog in a specimen jar and it launched an obsession. She began scouring swap meets and web stores for more animal remains. Now, the 21-year-old says she's acquired about 17 specimen jars, 30 skulls and 100 bones.

"Other people collect comic books," says Manzo. "I collect skulls and bones."

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Courtesy of DooD

Andrea Carrano of DooD, and his dog George

​Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

Andrea Carrano was raised in Italy, which means he grew up with table-fed canines. That also was true of his brother-in-law, Ali Niroomand, who grew up in France.

"Very few people were buying store-bought dog food there," Carrano says. "My parents would give the dogs basically table scraps, chicken leftovers and brown rice."

Fast-forward a few decades, when, weary of industrial-size bags of puppy chow and lethargic pets, the Carrano and Niroomand families again began feeding their pups homemade food. They noticed a world of difference: Their pets' tails were waggier and their breath was almost pleasant (which, for a dog, is saying something).

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Nanette Gonzales

Joey, left, and Anthony Hernandez in their downtown factory

​Sift through the sale rack at your local Forever 21 mall store and you may come across a T-shirt with a picture of a girl staring into shards of a mirror. Retailing for $14.90, it is a seemingly edgy but ultimately innocuous shirt. It has no particular brand affiliation, no band or product or company to promote: It's an enigmatic graphic tee in a sea of throwaway, enigmatic graphic tees. It could have bubbled into the world fully formed from the collective teenybopper consciousness.

Instead, the tee came from the Rule Garment Manufacture factory in downtown L.A. It was created -- designed, manufactured and printed -- six months ago by one of the factory's owners, 26-year-old Joey Hernandez. Forever 21 ordered 3,000 pieces, and they have moved briskly. "It's sold 40 percent so far," says Joey, sitting at a computer in his factory's office. "You get no credit as a designer, but you get paid."

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Nanette Gonzales

Patrick Davis, Brawler

​With a fit build and a face that's equal parts Ryan O'Neal and Ralph Lauren model, Patrick Davis looks like a dude who'd play beach volleyball, or audition for "handsome" roles in TV commercials. Scratch the surface, though, and you'll find a fearless brawler who can transform in the blink of an eye from a mellow, endearingly spacey soul to a whirlwind of hard-swinging fists.

"It was never like someone would step on my shoe and I'd be, like, 'Let's fight, bro,' " says Davis, 42. "It was more like somebody would shove me in a bar, and I'd be, like, 'Hey, calm down.' And he'd be, like, 'What are you, Mr. Tough Guy?' "

As it turns out, he was Mr. Tough Guy. After about 35 street fights -- many in L.A. -- he was hit with the inspiration to combine his bloody, bare-knuckle hobby with his mostly deferred dream of being a writer. He self-published Fighteytown: An Auto-Fight-Ography, the self-deprecating story of an overprivileged underachiever told through the prism of his often ridiculous fights.

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© Eugenia P. Butler Estate

Eugenia Bulter Jr. showed Electric Cord Piece (1967) at her mother's gallery

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The best art this week is all in Hollywood, where major-leaguers look like superheroes and an eccentric 1960s gallerist makes a thrilling comeback.

5. Sunglass art
Artist Alex Israel, who makes surreal installations out of Hollywood props, also designs sunglasses for his L.A.-centric brand Freeways Eyewear (John Baldessari's quote "I will not look at any more boring art" is on a new pair). Israel's new Abbot Kinney mural isn't a sunglass ad but, intentionally, it has that crisp, seductive feeling of a beachside advertisement minus a brand name. Will you be able to spot it as art? And does it matter if you can't? 1212-C Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice; up indefinitely. (310) 426-8040, vsf.la.

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