skip to main |
skip to sidebar
"I had a lineage. My grandfather was a Marine in World War II. My father enlisted in Vietnam. En-listed. When I was a kid, my mom signed me up for a little league team sponsored by a funeral home because that would be the only way that I would get the experience of wearing a uniform that thousands died for."
This was the joke that opened Friday night's 20th Comedy Meltdown at Meltdown Comics on Sunset Ave, a well-loved event that has drawn comedians like Kyle Kinane, the author of the joke above, to a hot shack of a room in the back of a comic book store. And it was after this joke that the other crowd, not just the comedians or their friends, but the crowd of casual weekenders who wandered into the shop for the limitless Asahi Dry Lager served until 10 PM, realized that the talent of the comedians wasn't at all reflective of the bargain-basement ticket prices.
The low cost of entry must have made the comedians comfortable, too. Three of them (Kinane, Howard Kremer, and surprise headliner Aziz Ansari) debuted new material. I've seen Kinane a handful of times over the past year and his set at Meltdown, a high culture polemic tossed with some low culture minutiae, showed the comedian in top form. It's rare that an artist of any sort can completely shovel out the old and so perfectly incorporate the new.
And it's rarer still when the new material works without any stylistic incorporation whatsoever. In 2007, Howard Kremer's set was good enough to be showcased in a half-hour Comedy Central special. Mostly, the showcase was for Kremer's alter-ego and rap alias, Dragon Boy Suede, designed to do the same for rap as Tenacious D did for folk. But at Meltdown, his set changed completely. Kremer didn't hunch over and hype-mock a culture; he just stood on stage and told us to, "Have a Summah."
Kremer told us about chewing his Summer gum, about rolling around with his Summer partners in the Summer sand. Of course, none of this sounds funny - that's one of the pitfalls about reviewing a comedy show - but in the heat of Meltdown's back room, Kremer's Summer stories took on, as a friend put it, a true vitality, imploring us lost Angelinos to appreciate the gift of our single spectacular season. It was as if we were witnessing A Prairie Home Companion from an alternate universe, one in which that radio stalwart manages to be funny for those of us under the retirement age. Kramer's was easily the best set of the night.
As with any variety show, it wasn't all good. Paper Hearts creator and Michael Cera's pseudo-muse Charlene Yi showed once again that the audience member having the most fun at a Charlene Yi performance is … Charlene Yi. Aziz Ansari had the rotten luck of having to follow Howard Kremer, but fortunately for Ansari, he happens to possess an unapologetically quick wit. Some light heckling from the front row was addressed and dispensed without remorse.
Standing in the back of the room, the comedians were as boisterous as the audience. Most of them write for, or star in, television shows. All of them decided to donate their time to what is ostensibly a charity. And you can't help but feel special when sitting in a room like that, drinking beer out of an Asahi tallboy, enjoying the final days of Summer.
Originally in Los Angeles Magazine
Forty years have now passed since Wolman's on-site reporting at Woodstock, plenty of time for the importance of that weekend of noisy outdoor recreation to be inflated, deflated, and inflated once more. But whether or not you think Woodstock changed the world, Wolman's images of free love in the fields stand today as echoes from the booming youth of a generation that has grown 40 years older, but no less passionate.
From the looks of it, many have also purchased real estate in Malibu, where Wolman was on-hand to present and sign some of his best-known rock photos at the just-opened Malibu Lumber Yard high-end shopping center last week. This turned out to be another lucky night, first for the leather-jacket-clad boomers and their boomer-ette wives, who watched a slideshow of black-and-white photos and a short history presentation with the photographer, and second for the Lumber Yard itself, which has been waiting for an event like this to establish itself as a Malibu destination.
The photographer’s concert photos are one thing, but it's his images of the era that are truly striking: A line of suburban cars on Haight St. in San Francisco, filled with tourists waiting to see and touch the latest attraction, hippies. A fence at Woodstock torn down by freeloaders. Wolman was there, the right place at the right time.
Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://www.lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=08/18/2009
When I first heard the idea behind the newest exhibition at Scion Installation Gallery LA, a collaboration with upstart organizer Flux and 8 young filmmakers, I thought the show would be a mess. Eight projectors running side-by-side with eight different audio tracks - sounded like a recipe for the incomprehensible.
I drove down Helms on August 15th to find a gallery completely unlike the one I knew. The main gallery space was divided into four distinct areas - one large space for live performances, one space divided with shipping crates dedicated to hip snippets of commercials, an interactive space with upturned playing cards and a crowd trying to figure out the musical pattern they created on a huge screen, and in the back, a full 1960s living room, complete with wood paneling and shag carpet.
The crowd, a mix of Culver City's commercial producers (perennial powerhouse Anonymous Content is only two streets over) searching for the next great creative director and a crowd of young filmmakers wishing to be inspired, wishing that one day, their work would be projected on screen.
Jannes Hendrikz, representing The Blackheart Gang of South Africa, a group that worked over three years on the work they presented at the gallery, had an idea of just how difficult that really is. Their piece, The Tale of How is a stunning work of animation, printmaking, sculpture, and (why not?) opera, and illustrated the difference between their efforts and those of a major studio. The behind-the-scenes video to accompany their piece took months to complete. According to Hendrikz, the project almost broke him. But a project the scale and quality of How gives hope to producers and peons alike: That good art still comes from hard work.
Originally in Los Angeles Magazine
And Vice seems to be decidedly against the push towards high-end digital magazine photography. If you're looking for work shot with a Canon EOS 1Ds MkIIIs, 580EX IIs, L-Series lenses, or any of the other tech gear lusted after by amateurs and professionals alike, you'd be better served elsewhere. Most of the photos in Vice look like they were taken with thrift store cameras on grainy film past its expiration date. Most deliberately ignore the classic rules of photography. But Vice, being an international mag with considerable clout, prints and presents the photos beautifully, so that what you get is a collection of expensive blurred and grainy photos of somebody's young, naked girlfriend. Why shouldn’t we non-Vice photographers be jealous?
To make matters worse, this year the mag decided to celebrate three of its young photogs with a gallery showing at the Scion Installation L.A. Gallery in Culver City. The opening had all three artists—Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, Maggie Lee, and Tim Barber—in attendance along with an almost-capacity crowd of onlookers, most of who waited in line for the free Asahi Beer and tried to take photographs of the prints with their digicams.
But there was a smaller group too, one that was a little older and more accustomed to art galleries and free valet parking. They wore sensible khakis and semi-circled the space, not straying far from the photos. Vice and the near-mythos behind it didn't seem to matter much to them. They drifted, wordlessly, from print to print, altogether unconcerned with hype. Then they left, walking right past the three artists in their skinny jeans, past the party photographer snapping away, and past the restless crowd working so hard at youth.
Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://www.lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=08/03/2009
