Great. i hate when people are right about L.A.

Oh... I just had to copy this:

Sunday, November 05, 2006
Great. i hate when people are right about L.A.
no, thats mean. but im so disappointed. still in the bay area right now. in monterey with william and haning out with his family. friday i wanted to run away from it all and become homeless in san francisco. i planned it all out in my head and had wonderful fantasies of recreating a past lifestyle. andy, william and i spent thursday evening on famous haight street and it just wasnt all that i hoped. the truth is i just didnt make it all it could be. andy seemed to be having fun and i felt self concious cuz i was being a drag and tired. the only thing that wowed me for the evening was the 'i banana andy' t-shirt that i desperatly want now. anyhow, william and i ended up in SF friday and hung out downtown. thats where i wish we would have gone thursday night. i have so many mixed emotions about the art world now. went to a couple galleries and was disappointed. but it wasnt till we went to carmel yesterday that i realized i have no idea whats going on in the art world or what it means. i always had artistic inclinations my whole life but i never took classes or joined art club. my friends were in it. so my first exposure to the art world was basically working at la luz de jesus gallery when i first moved to LA. it was baiscally a sort of boot camp art 101. i had my co-workers trying to show me the ropes and then the fact that i had all these books on art (all forms but especially surreal/dada/lowbrow) and then there was the gallery in the back. celebrities galore! so going to these galleries in carmel and the couple in san francisco broke my heart. i had no idea that most galleries are seen as stores. its basically like walking into target and depending on the art its like target/walmart. so here we are, the cutting edge gallery, and this is the fucking thanks we get (i just read this today):

The Article


"Halloweekend
By DANI KATZ
Wednesday, November 1, 2006 - 3:00 pm
Wednesday I got a desperate phone call from my friend Michael, who had no idea what to wear for Halloween. He didn..t give me much to work with .. just the beard on his face and a hot, young girlfriend.

..Charles Manson and Sharon Tate?.. I offered.

..Kristen has no idea who they are,.. he barked, referring to his 20-something, live-in love with the enviable shoulders and the ..80s infancy.

..Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand from A Star Is Born?.. I countered.

..She doesn..t get your obscure vintage-pop references, Dani,.. he scolded.

After a dozen more bearded man/hot chick suggestions, he decided he liked my Richie and Margot Tenenbaum suggestion .. at least The Royal Tenenbaums came out this decade.

The next day I found myself accompanying Michael downtown, to a Santee-adjacent wholesale suit store. A coolly uttered code word allowed us escorted entrée into a basement filled with ..new on-rack vintage.. suits and jackets, where we hoped to find a size 44 extra-long camelhair, à la Luke Wilson..s Richie Tenenbaum character.

I pulled a shrunken camel-colored corduroy sports coat off the rack and held it up for Michael to try.

..What size is it?.. he asked, squinting, doubting.

..Forty-four,.. I said, passing it to him.

..Do you think by saying it..s a 44, you..re going to manifest it larger?..

..Yes...

..Sorry, hippie,.. he said, maneuvering out of the tiny coat. ..It doesn..t work like that...

Luckily, Reese, the basement manager with bright eyes, gray beard and an infinite arsenal of animal calls, found the perfect Richie Tenenbaum suit for just $75. Moments later, Michael was being fitted for next-day adjustments by the mustached tailor next door.

But Halloweekend..s festivities really kicked in for me Friday night when my boyfriend (Dead Schoolboy) and I (Girl Scout) scoped the opening of Andrew Krasnow..s ..Of the Flesh: Skin Works.. at ADM Project gallery in Hollywood. The show comprised a 10-year span of installations .. mostly politically charged protest pieces, all carefully sewn together with swaths of human skin, ..legally acquired,.. according to the gallery. Krasnow..s skin art included several American flags, a map of the United States, a Bible, a human heart, a surprisingly lovable walrus and a hamburger .. topped with human teeth in addition to skin lettuce and skin tomato. While I admired Krasnow..s seam work, I was largely repulsed by the flesh-as-fabric medium, bored by the reactive antiwar/anti-Bush message and put off by the Jewish-artist-as-skin-tailor theme.

..Too meta,.. I commented while leafing through a short stack of slides that recorded the surgical removal of Krasnow..s skin from his very own torso.

..I know,.. affirmed Dead Schoolboy, who made the obvious comparison to last year..s equally horrifying ..Body Works.. spectacle: ..He..s just the next guy on line to make a sucky art thing about the body with the suffix ..works.....

We fled skin city to check out a friend..s party at a Rudolpho..s in Silver Lake, where an overwhelming collection of creative costumes almost made up for the crummy DJ. We saw a deep-sea-dredged Natalie Wood, a Karma Chameleonic Boy George, a bookish zombie and an uptown bunny, the most dapper of the lot, not to mention a stunningly realistic John C. Reilly costume that everyone tried their best not to stare at. Unfortunately, the music outweighed the eye candy (who plays ..80s music at parties anymore?) and we hightailed it to Torung to scarf down cheap chile shrimp and veggie dumplings before conking out for the night.

Saturday crept in, and I decided to sprinkle some dead on my Girl Scout outfit with a quickly crafted back story (mauled by a rabid raccoon) and a few well-placed flesh wounds, thanks to a deft application of ..fresh scab.. ($4.95 at Robinson Beautilities on Venice). We headed out at dusk to tour the altars at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, raised annually in honor of its Dia de los Muertos celebration. Apparently the better part of Los Angeles had the same idea, and we wandered blood-caked elbow to blood-caked elbow with thousands of costumed altar gawkers, alter kockers and concession hawkers through the cemetery. Some of the altars were truly inspired, making creative use of sand and food and flowers and skulls of all shapes and sizes, while paying homage to loved ones passed. We nibbled Thin Mints while listening to an unlikely grouping of accordion, standup bass, bongos and clackers serenading a formidable audience Latin style on the well-groomed grass near the cemetery pond.

Next we headed west to see the Poetics (with guest MCs Leggo and Buddha Black of the daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra) rock a jaw-dropping backyard set at a tiny Venice house party. Gilligan, Don King and the Humpty Hump bumped up against Rainbow Brite and a busty St. Pauli girl. We were all smiles, dancing in wigged and masked splendor under the stars on a balmy pre-Hallow..s eve, greedily sucking down daylight saving..s extra hour until the cops (real cops that is, neither slutty, Keystone, nor dead) stopped by to say hey, grab a beer and ask ever so sweetly if we might turn that music down, lest we receive a loud-party citation ($300 to $1,800).

Midnight found us grooving at Warszawa on Lincoln with throngs of local Westside gals donning various versions of ..Slutty ___.. (Snow White, milkmaid, FBI agent, et al.). The DJ spun incongruous hip-hop gems slammed against party-killing nostalgic Top 40. (Who plays ..80s music at parties anymore?) We headed to the Aero Theatre to ponder the 2 a.m.-ish screening of Pumpkinhead, but chose instead to head home and engage in a little necromancy before washing off the fake blood and calling it a Halloween."

this was in the LA Weekly for the 'Whats Happening in LA' section. i didnt want to cut out the article and just point out her 'review' for our gallery because the rest of her story is important. its important to see who it is we're dealing with. Dani Katz. whats awful is this isnt even really a review. i've read her other stuff and she basically runs around LA dictating what/where everyone should be doing/going. it makes me sick that her boyfriend ignorantly says that andrew is just another guy 'waiting in line with a sucky art thing blah blah blah'. the whole thing is so superficial and whats wrong with LA but quite specifically whats wrong with out culture. i hate her seemingly brilliant repartee. if she was so goddamn brilliant she'd realize her shallow reaction is his [Andrew Krasnow] whole point for doing the show. people who are desensatized. people who are detached. people who just dont care. yes of course the skin is repulsive. yes of course andrew [Krasnow] getting the skin removed from himself is repulsive. gee does anyone ever stop to think what this all means? ask questions? find a greater purpose? i suppose not. i suppose it serves the greater LA good to have some ridiculously self imposed opinion like "who plays 80s at parties anymore?". plenty of people and plenty pf people have fun and exactly what kind of 80s are we talking about? hairbands? new wave? industrial? goth industrial? Pop like Tiffany and tht Eddie Murphy song? Gay 80s like erasure and pet shop boys? her stupidity is encrypted in all of her proud rhetoric. and yes i'll say it again. i hate it when people are right about LA.

but theres my turmoil once again. does no one appreciate art? i realized this is the case. they are either clueless or highly superficial and mostly very ignorant. but thats ok and i need to get over it cuz im ignorant too and im sick of talking about this.