Tag: visual art

Glenn O’Brien is Dead & The Squares Are Back in Power: The Time to Party is Now

Brent Smith April 12, 2017

“We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds, and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” -Bukowski In the past year, we’ve lost a lot of artists, icons, and legends in series of celebrity death waves the likes of which America hasn’t seen since maybe the 60s. The best of us have been dropping like flies. It weighs on the psyche, some more than others. The recent passing of writer, editor, and host of the bacchanal public access show TV Party, Glenn O’Brien, hit me harder than any. This came even to my own surprise. I spent the weekend mulling it over. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t any household name, most people have never heard of him. Maybe it’s because I felt a closer bond to the understated legacy of O’Brien than say that of Bowie or Prince—figures of such demigod magnitude that they were untouchable. O’Brien was accessible. I’d catch an infrequent Instagram post or the occasional sardonic dig at Trump on Twitter. I looked up to O’Brien, and always will. For me, he’s canonized, and not in any awe, but in

Summer Happenings at The Broad: The Perfect Excuse To Hit The Museum

Danny Baraz August 26, 2016

Last week, I got an email from a publicist named Jonathan who invited Janky Smooth to come cover the third installment of Non Object(ive), Summer Happenings event at The Broad Museum in Downtown Los Angeles. I became pretty excited. Not because of the lineup of DJ’s and performers that were scheduled to perform such as Vampire Weekend’s, Rostam or Sparkle Division but because I have yet to experience The Broad Museum since it opened in September 2015. Yes, begin your culture shaming now. It’s not as if you need media credentials to view The Broad’s permanent collection of postwar and contemporary art but you do need to make reservations that are backed up by 2 months and also, pay extra to view the Cindy Sherman exhibit, attend the Summer Happenings show and have access to all areas of the museum. So covering some music I only had a mild interest in wasn’t a big price to pay to walk all areas of The Broad. Last month, Summer Happenings featured a reading by Richard Hell and a dark wave DJ set by Sky Ferreira so I was more than a bit interested to see the scene that was developing amongst the

Jaco Pastorius Doc Gets West Coast Premiere at The Ace Theater Los Angeles

Danny Baraz November 24, 2015

No matter how much you practice, you’ll never, ever be able to play bass like Jaco Pastorius. Even if you break your thumbs to bend like Jaco’s, you’ll never be able to reach those notes because he pulled them from the sky. Jaco Pastorius was touched with a gift. A gift that can’t be found under a Xmas tree. A gift that made him super human, as far as the bass guitar was concerned and fragile in the ways that being “different” exposes one’s human frailty- drawing that fine line that is always associated with his type of genius. Sunday night at the opulent Ace Theater and Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, the culmination of 6 years of filmmaking resulted in a packed house for a star-studded, west coast premiere of the film “Jaco”. The theater was filled with legendary musicians, even as the AMA’s were taking place up the street at The Microsoft Theater. Incredibly, even though Jaco Pastorius was nominated for two Grammy’s for his self titled debut solo album in 1977, Pastorius never won an industry wide award. So, as One Direction was winning their Artist of the Year accolades only a few blocks away, producer and

The Bay to L.A.: Cahill Wessel Opening Launches Carlos Queso Gallery

Brent Smith October 8, 2015

The first time I saw Cahill Wessel IRL he was already zipping past me, skating down Alvarado, through the neglected tent city 101 underpass, probably picking up more beer for the show. The Faded Glory exhibit was an inaugural night for the Carlos Queso Gallery, starting things off right with psychedelic renderings. The new art space is a true studio, like the shoeboxes we’re accustomed to living in, no more than maybe a few hundred square feet, making for intimate mingling that’s often lost to the cold spaces of larger galleries. There were sincere welcomes and good conversation as janky hipsters and shaggy gutterheads grabbed wine and beer from the cooler. Sharing the bill was artist Chris Rexroad, who not only holds a stake in the new gallery, but whose frisky collisions of 40 oz. Olde English, gold chains, and nature weaved in nicely with Wessel’s kitschy cartoon visions of tropical horror. Cahill Wessel showed back up carrying his skateboard in a loose, ratty t-shirt, skinny jeans, and a worn ‘Hawaii’ tourist trucker hat. Sipping beer and chain-smoking, he was all smiles, friendly and approachable, stoked on meeting new people. He and friends were crashing Airbnb-style. They raged at Los

Dismaland Would Kill in California: Murky Reflections in the Last Days of Summer

Brent Smith September 1, 2015

Whether we’re working retail or stumbling out of bed to make it to class (or both), it’s obvious that summer’s over. Some of us are bummed out, longing for those poolside tunes (and drinks), and pensively reminiscing about our summer hook-ups as we drive down the boulevard blasting either the cover of “Boys Of Summer” by The Ataris or Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness” out the windows. While others of us may still be swearing and spitting at this goddamn fucking heat (and if you’re like me, you’re ravenously ushering in an early autumn with midnight magic spells in black-hooded cloaks, early morning rain dances in the nude, and animal sacrifices using the neighbor’s pets—you know the one, always barks at dawn in between trash pickups). Whichever side of the spectrum we’re on, we can all get a kick out of the ‘commercial’ for Banksy’s Dismaland in Somerset, England; along with a last (and rather gothic) taste of summer in this foul year of our lord—Two-Thousand & Fifteen. In the spirit of Dismaland’s dystopic commentary on our modern, and nightmarishly globalized mega-culture of oil spills, the refugee crisis, domestic abuse, abusive banking institutions, ramped up police states, or the psychopathic

Tod Seelie’s “Outland Empire” opens at Superchief Gallery in LA

Danny Baraz March 11, 2015

Tod Seelie– A New York based conceptual photographer opens a gallery show in L.A. with L.A. as his subject. One might think that you would see images of glamour, celebrities and sparkling oceans and gentrified neighborhoods. Too many have come in to this city with their lens to act as some sort of proxy paparazzi and half heartedly walked amongst the more obvious landmarks and landscapes to capture a cliche. I knew, even before viewing his work at the Superchief Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles that that would not be the case with Tod Seelie. Tod Seelie’s show, “Outland Empire” captures Los Angeles and it’s outlying territories in a sort of post apocalyptic glamour. The glamor of tweekers and flamethrowers and the glamour of beer and sweat soaked teenagers in the midst of an angry slam pit. Non obvious landscapes and non obvious people as subjects seems to be what catches Seelie’s eye. Eaddy from Ho99o9 mentioned that they would be playing a show at the Tod Seelie opening the other week and I drew a blank on the connection between the name Tod Seelie and his works. Once I started doing some digging I came across his Bright Nights book and

The LA Art/Book Fair with Thurston Moore and Ho99o9

Danny Baraz February 4, 2015

Los Angeles- our Art, Literature, Music, Culture and Tacos Can No Longer Be Easily Dismissed L.A. is in the midst of a renaissance. While most might call it gentrification, those people are not in the trenches that are being filled with artists, students, activists, authors and poets. While Manhattan and even Brooklyn are becoming more inaccessible to artists without extensive investment portfolios, the geography of Los Angeles allows those with small bank accounts and big ideas to fan out east and still be within the city and county limits of L.A. While the former glory, grit, angst, junkies, music scenes and yes, stank of Hollywood and The Sunset Strip have been replaced with chain night clubs, over priced eateries, spruced up sceneries and former botox beauty queens, Echo and Highland Park, East L.A., Boyle Heights and even the former toilet bowl known as Downtown Los Angeles are overflowing with housing, lockout rehearsal studios and concrete, commercial structures that house painters and nihilistic youth. Idealism abounds and there is even more real estate further east that can support small budgets and big dreams, at least until the day that LA is swallowed by the Pacific Ocean. Los Angeles has always gotten a bad