By Liz Ohanesian

Colin Christian "Freaky Deaky"

Clowns. Once their bulbous noses and painted grins adorned living rooms and children's bedrooms across the nation. But times changed, and the great clown painting became a relic of mid-twentieth century Americana, the faces meant to provoke smiles now inducing goosebumps for the post-Pennywise generation.

It was one such 1950s painting found in an antique shop during the course of a father-son road trip that led Culver City's Corey Helford Gallery to resurrect the star of circuses and fifth birthday parties for its newest show “Clowns! The Reinterpretation of the Classic American Clown Painting.” The group show, which opened on November 15, featured fifty-two pieces commissioned by the gallery from artists ranging from the easily recognizable, like Shag, Paul Frank and Tokidoki, to up-and-comers like Sweden-based Anneli Olander and local Natalia Fabia. Several artists, including acclaimed British street artist D*Face, appeared courtesy of London's StolenSpace Gallery.

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By Alan Rich

AFTER 2010, WHAT? "It's been a momentous week," noted Mark Swed in Friday's "Critic’s Notebook,” and he was, even so, a day early. The worst news of last week, many weeks, was Gérard Mortier's decision to resign as head of the New York City Opera, over the unwillingness of board members to finance his dreams, before a note was sung under his administration. A forward move in operatic administration that could be likened to -- what? -- to the striding forth of the New York City Opera at its inception, -- had claimed a major leader. Mortier is, beyond doubt, opera's great contemporary creative spirit. His plans for New York were thrilling.

Here at home we are in a momentous dither over the ten weeks of RingFest that will seize our city's interest in 2010, direct our collective gaze toward a certain mode of artistic expression, adapt our taste buds toward a certain culinary ideal (mostly covered with brown sauce, if memory serves), fill our ears with massive orchestrations of unresolved dominant thirteenths. I’ve seen it happen. I was in Seattle in 1975, during early Ringmania. Glynn Ross and his opera company were venting upon the city not one but two Rings, one sung in English the other not, and United Airlines was sharing in a citywide promotion so vast that everyone you saw on the streets carried a UAL bag decorated with Valhalla images. The performances weren’t much; the sets were make-do, but that was a Ring, by God, and it ran for several years. I went up and wrote that it wasn't very good, and several shocked local critics came to interview me; nobody had ever noticed before. It got Seattle so bored with the whole Ring idea that when Speight Jenkins took over the company and started producing real opera, including a handsome, naturalistic Ring set among Northwest-style evergreens, and beautifully performed, the public regarded it as an opera, not some kind of shrine.

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By Liz Ohanesian

Winner of the Elfdoll Halloween contest that took place October 25. Photo by Jackie Canchola.

The popularity of resin-based ball-jointed dolls (BJD), typically made in Japan, South Korea and China, has grown dramatically in the United States over the past five years, creating a community revolving around fan forums like Den of Angels, local meet-ups and a few nationwide conventions. Of the numerous BJD companies, Elfdoll, a subsidiary of South Korean firm Artmaze, is renowned for detailed, human-like features. The company opened its Glendale showroom last year after realizing that roughly 70% of its sales came from the U.S. and has since become the center of the greater Los Angeles BJD community.

Headless Elfdolls. Photo by Jackie Canchola.

“We think that we are not a doll company, we are artists,” says Elfdoll Foreign Trade Manager Yeounjoo Lim, best known to her customers and friends as Ms. Cholong.

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By Christopher Miles

Image source: www.patriciafauregallery.com

Gallerist Patricia Faure, a mainstay of the Los Angeles gallery scene for
decades, died in her sleep on October 21 at the age of 80. Faure began as
art dealer Nicholas Wilder’s assistant in the 1970s. For fifteen years, she
and friend Betty Asher ran the Asher/Faure Gallery, one of a handful of
venues that helped raise the profile of the LA gallery scene in the '80s. In
1994, she opened her own gallery at Bergamot Station, where her corner space
was a cornerstone of the complex for ten years before she began phasing out
of the business.

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Yvonne Walker of "The Exiles"

This past Friday, artist and skateboard maker Douglas Miles of Apache Skateboards was in town at the Artist Gallery to unveil a new series of pieces inspired by "The Exiles" -- Kent Mackenzie's recently re-released 1961 film about the lives of Native Americans in Downtown Los Angeles.

Miles hails from the same Apache reservation in San Carlos, Arizona as the film's star, and the subject of a recent LA Weekly feature, Yvonne Walker. With the energy generated from the film, Miles is attempting launch a new wave of contemporary native pop art and culture -- that's respectful of traditional Indian artistic elements, but isn't bound by them.

The show opened with a performance by Highland Park's teenage all-girl punk outfit The Sirens.

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Original Z-Boy Nathan Pratt, then and now. Click on image for entire slideshow. Photograph by Shannon Cottrell.

In the 1970s it took a group of Venice-based visionary artists, surf and skateboard shapers, and passionate rag-tag kids to revolutionize skateboarding and launch the rebel skater lifestyle that we know today. At this point, I'd like to think that anyone who hasn't heard of Dogtown or the legendary Z-Boys must have spent the past 30 years living in some underground bunker, subsiding off canned peas and beef jerky, with nothing but a dusty AM radio to connect them to outside world and the ever-changing city of Los Angeles that pulses above.

It doesn't matter whether or not you lived in 1970s-era Venice or Santa Monica during Dogtown's heyday and witnessed skate and surf history with your own, saltwater-stung eyes. Damn, you didn't even have to be born yet. My point is that even if you have never heard of these guys, your life in L.A. has been changed by the Dogtown Z-Boy legacy of being one of the most important art and sport subculture revolutions to originate on the West Coast... ever.

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This weekend was one of celebration in Los Angeles, packed with more events than we could scramble to cover. Friday night kicked off with a special VIP party at Crewest Gallery in Downtown L.A. where The Label Lab hosted the opening of the "The Z-Boy Show—Direct from the Source," featuring work from from Dogtown skate art originators Skip Engblom, Chris Cahill, Peggy Oki, Nathan Pratt, C.R. Stecyk III and more. You can check out the show again this Thursday October 9th as part of the Downtown L.A. art walk from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m at Crewest Gallery at 110 Winston, between 4th and 5th streets. I highly recommend it.

Saturday we set up camp Downtown for L.A. Weekly's annual Detour Fest featuring The Mars Volta, Gogol Bordello, Shiny Toy Guns, The Presets, Cut Copy, Matt Costa, Black Lips, Hercules and Love Affair, Grand Ole Party, Datarock, Bitter:Sweet, The Submarines and more. Our finest scribes and photographers were on the prowl, leaving no Budweiser-stained band flyer unturned, as they ventured stage-to-stage to bring you festival highlights.

Randall Roberts dodged flying rolls of toilet paper with the Black Lips.

Liz Ohanesian got swept away with Hercules and Love affair and later danced with Cut Copy.

Shannon Cottrell and I hung out backstage with headliners Gogol Bordello, Elijah Wood and Blake Hazard of the Submarines.

Photograph by Shannon Cottrell. Click image for slideshow.

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced this morning (well, if you don't count the New York Times and L.A. Times, both of which got the story last week for publication today) a $45 million donation from Stewart and Lynda Resnick. The gift will fund the building of a large new Renzo Piano exhibition space directly behind the architect’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM). The one-story building, 200 feet by 180 feet, will feature all natural light via a skylight system like that of BCAM, and is expected to house special exhibitions.

The announcement, held in a tent on the site, was made by LACMA director Michael Govan. (Okay, the CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, yadda yadda.) He introduced Lynda Resnick, who has been on the acquisitions board at the museum for 16 years. She credited Govan's leadership as being central to her and her husband's decision. Stewart Resnick said there were two reasons he decided to make the donation: "Number one, because Lynda wanted to do it."

At this point, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, sitting next to the podium, made an aside to Stewart Resnick, who laughed and said, "Antonio, who knows something about the relationship between men and women" – doh! – "says that's also the second reason." Stewart Resnick went on to add that Los Angeles had been very good to him, better than other places might have been, and that he believed in giving back to the community.

When the mayor spoke, he said how amazing it was that the Resnicks had accumulated so much wealth having started washing windows. Lynda Resnick, who was wearing a fetching gray outfit that suggested there are more millions where the 45 came from, immediately noted with a faint look of horror that it was not she who had done the windows.

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The news of David Foster Wallace's apparent suicide this weekend here in Southern California -- he was found in his Claremont home Friday night by his wife Karen Green -- has prompted tributes all over the web. One of the most unusual and intimate portraits comes from Pomona College political theory professor and author John Seery, who writes on The Huffington Post that he was a longtime workout partner of Wallace's. "I didn't dare divulge that fact to anyone in the vicinity," Seery writes. "He called himself agoraphobic. I didn't want a bunch of people descending upon the gym. It was thus I had the privilege of getting to know him in a quiet space, while stretching and doing sit-ups, and talking and talking between sets."

Seery also describes "a creepy-funny David Foster Wallacesque moment, something weird you'd read about in one of his essays -- yet there he was in person, in the flesh, while it happened."

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Downtown Los Angeles is known for its hidden nighttime gems. With its after-hour speakeasies and never-ending supply of street meat (specifically the "illegal" bacon-wrapped hot dog) -- this city is a treasure trove of late night indulgences. Last Saturday, however, I stumbled across one of its finest oddities, the Bronx Zoo, in broad daylight.

Each Saturday afternoon through the third week in October, Silver Lake art gallery Ghettogloss invades La Cita bar (off 3rd and Hill) to host the Bronx Zoo -- a weekly art class that re-invents figure drawing, King Kong style. From 3-8 p.m. on La Cita's outdoor patio, every hour on the hour there is an "ape escape" when leggy bikini-clad models, with faces obscured by gorilla masks, are released from a backstage holding cell of sorts. Gorilla mask and black bikini firmly in place, the models take center stage where they strike and hold a pose for patrons (or artists) to sketch.

The models typically hold still for 12-15 minutes until a Ghettogloss rep blows the "monkey alarm," signaling a change in pose. Bloody Mary in hand, I watched as the artists furiously smeared charcoal and pastel across canvas, determined to have their pieces selected for the upcoming November 14th Ghettogloss group show curated by Flavorpill's Shana Nys Dambrot, featuring the best of the Bronx Zoo drawings.

Los Feliz local Tom Voorhies, one of the first artists to arrive at La Cita, has been studying figure drawing since college and this marked his fifth time at the Bronx Zoo. He laughed, “The gorilla mask is so funny I think it helps the artist open up.” I asked another artist, Robert Vargas, a second timer who lives Downtown, why he keeps coming back. He simply smiled and said, “I love painting in a concrete jungle.”

Though Ghettogloss maintains a strict "no cameras or photography allowed" rule, the gallery gave L.A. Weekly inside access to shoot the afternoon of drinks, live drawing and nearly naked gorilla girls. Check out the entire slideshow here.

The Bronx Zoo
Presented by Ghettogloss
Each Saturday from 3-8 p.m. at La Cita
336 S Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013

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Theater News: The Mark Taper Forum's $30 Million Face Lift; Galatea aims for Fringe NYC festival; Company of Angeles former president Paul Brennan dies.

TAPER FACELIFT

On Tuesday morning, Center Theatre Group rolled out its $30 million re-design of the Mark Taper Forum, that has been dark for two years for remodeling, for press, CTG staff and sundry County Supes., including Gloria Molina, Yvonne B. Burke and Zev Yaroslavsky. Female patrons will be most pleased by the new women's bathroom and its 16 stalls (up from four), upping the odds that theater-going femmes now stand a chance of making it back on time for Act 2.

The facility now includes elevators between the upper loges and parking lot . Most of the perks, however, are for the folks creating the shows. Back in the day, the entire set for Tony Kushner's epic, Angels in America had to be cut down to fit through a 4' by 9' loading door, then reconfigured on the other side.

Worse, entry to the backstage required climbing a small flight of steps. That loading door is now a more comfortable now 6' by 9', and the entire backstage floor has been lowered by 2' 9”, accommodating easier access. The lobby floor has also bee lowered and expanded, and the lobby now includes a subterranean bar for meeting and greeting.

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By Siran Babayan

A wise person once said, “Life is like a piece of shredded wheat.” No, it wasn’t Gandhi. It was Sophia Petrillo, aka Estelle Getty.

Sophia came to this country a poor Sicilian immigrant with nothing but a pizza recipe and a dream (she was robbed by Mama Celeste). Her son was a cross-dresser, and her daughter , Dorothy, got knocked up in high school and married a dumb bachagaloop who wore a toupee.

After escaping from a lovely nursing home called Shady Pines, Sophia spent the remainder of her life living in Miami with her daughter and two other women: dimwitted but lovable Minnesotan Rose, and bed-hopping but lovable tramp Blanche.

They laughed and ate cheesecake. They talked about their first times and ate cheesecake. They helped the police nab a couple of jewel thieves and ate cheesecake.

Sophia dined with the likes of Burt Reynolds; sang with Julio Iglesias; and claimed to have had an affair with Picasso. Her hobbies included stealing money from her daughter’s purse and going to the beach so she could watch old men rearrange themselves when they get out of the water. She’s probably still doing that somewhere in Miami.

Getty may have gone to that retirement community in the sky, but Sophia and her straw purse will forever live in television. The Golden Girls not only changed how we look at dessert, but taught us how to laugh with the elderly, and whether you’re gay, straight or just short and perpetually cranky like her, Sophia spoke to the Italian yenta in all of us.

We should all aspire to be half the person Sophia was (half is fine; she was just under five feet). And may we all be a burden on our children in our old age.

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A note from Robert Weiss received July 5 sought to clarify his position regarding his call for a boycott of all the theaters associated with Center Theatre Group, after Weiss had claimed (mistakenly) that CTG donor and board member Howard Ahmanson, Jr. had contributed $400,000 to the anti-gay marriage initiative on the November ballot. (Howard Howard Ahmanson, Sr. gave seed money in 1964 to the theater that bears his name, and died four years later. His son, Howard Ahmanson, Jr recently made the sizable contribution to California Protect Marriage, sponsor of the ballot initiative that Weiss is referring to. Ahmanson, Jr. is neither a donor to, nor a board member of, the theater.)

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On June 25, this blog reported on a mass email sent around the city by Robert Weiss calling for a boycott of the Ahmanson Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum and the Kirk Douglas Theatre, until Center Theatre Group, which administers the three theaters, makes a policy statement vigorously opposing the contribution of $400,000 by Ahmanson Theatre benefactor Howard Ahmanson to the organization sponsoring the anti-gay marriage amendment on the November ballot.

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Amidst waves of student, faculty and alumni protests over soaring tuition rates and alleged capital mismanagement, trustees of the Art Center College of Design announced yesterday that Richard Koshalek's contract as president won't be renewed when it terminates at the end of next year. The move was a bit of a shock, as many on campus figured Koshalek was a lock to remain at Art Center and continue his plans to build a $50 million Frank Gehry designed library and research center.

Koshalek was the primary advocate of the building, and with his departure from the college eminent, the future of the DRC, as the building was to be called, remains unclear. In an online statement posted on Art Center's website, Chairman of the Board of Trustees John Puerner said that "the DRC, [is] now being reevaluated and reprioritized by the facilities and finance committees of the Board."

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Note From the Gay Marriage Wars: Bombing Innocent Civilians Jun 25, 2008
Stan Winston Loses Battle With Cancer Jun 16, 2008
Controversy Surrounds Yet Another Frank Gehry Project Jun 11, 2008
Local Theater Leader Suffers Major Heart Attack Jun 6, 2008
Vince McMahon Gets Star on Hollywood Blvd. Mar 14, 2008
Good Reads List / Good Reads Website Feb 5, 2008
Last Night: The Office Night, UCB Theatre, 12/18 Dec 19, 2007
Jonathan Gold meets N.W.A. Dec 5, 2007
Best Books of 2007 Nov 30, 2007
Actor Slaying Rattles Local Theater Company Nov 2, 2007