Shepard Fairey
Shepard Fairey is sitting at a long table in the offices of Studio Number One, his L.A. graphic design firm, with a sharpened No. 2 pencil in hand and stately, baroque portraits of Bobby Seale, Joe Strummer and Noam Chomsky – part of his Hero Stamp series – looming above him. Dressed in his standard... More
The Return of Elaine Dundy (and Sally Jay Gorce)
“I’ll tell you how it feels to be an overnight success at 86,” said the author Elaine Dundy over the telephone, laughing. She was inviting me to visit her at her Park La Brea home to talk about the recent New York Review Books reissue of her beloved 1958 proto-chick-lit novel, “The Dud Avocado.” Told... More
Witness to the Wit of An Arch and Fiery Spirit
Theresa Duncan worked hard to get out of Lapeer, Mich., where she was born in 1966, and where, last month, she was buried. On her blog, the Wit of the Staircase, the writer and filmmaker compared Lapeer to the small Texas town in Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show.” “You would think it was 1951,”... More
Rebirth of the Cool
In the spring of 2006, the Centre Pompidou in Paris launched the splashiest exhibition of L.A. modern art the world has seen to date, “Los Angeles 1955-1985: Birth of an Artistic Capital,” featuring 350 works by 85 artists. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa flew in for the opening, as did the collector and philanthropist Eli Broad,... More
Rooms With a View
There are 31 hotels and motels surrounding LAX, and artist Zoe Crosher has stayed in all of them — except one, the Royal Comfort Hotel, and that’s where we’re headed in her silver 1980 Mercedes at 10:30pm on a Wednesday night. Since 2001, Crosher has been photographing airplanes coming in to land, through the windows... More
Heart of Dixie
Seated at a long table at Musso & Frank, Lili Von Schtupp was looking up a number in her crystal-encrusted cell phone. “Oh, my God!” shouted Adonna Vichet, crossing the room clutching a glittering digital camera. “Swavski nines,” she said, referring to the size of the Swarovski crystals she’d glued to her camera. Not to... More
Bright Lights, Big City
Matt Dilling has no idea where his fascination with electricity came from. “I was never struck by lighting,” he says with a shrug, but he’s certain that his obsession with circuitry started at an early age. When he was three, Dilling asked his mother to decorate his birthday cake with an electrical plug made of... More
Mind Games
Remember the first time you saw a strobe light, and your friends looked like robots in a weird silent movie? Totally trippy, right? You were experiencing a variation on the “flicker effect,” a neurological phenomenon in which pulses of light directly stimulate the brain, altering states of mind and, in some cases, inducing hallucinations. Nowadays... More