At LACMA on Saturday night, a girl in a white Victorian dress sat on a bench with her hands folded, looking pissed off. A photographer from the clothing company Clockwork Couture stood a few feet away. “Want... (more...)

By far one of the greatest opening sequences of any film ever made is Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Yes, it’s the photography, the voice-over narration, the shots of New York City at its finest, but more... (more...)

I’ve never quite understood why the decorative arts are overlooked, but unfortunately they are the forgotten stepchild of all art collections. Throughout the entirety of my four years of art history... (more...)

I met artist, curator, and all-around art enthusiast Esteban Schimpf when he came out to the FineArtsLA: Panel of the Muses event we hosted back in June. He was there to support his friend, panelist,... (more...)

Randy and Jason Sklar, better known as the Sklar Brothers, even better known as the hosts of the only ESPN Classic show I’ve ever watched on a regular basis—Cheap Seats—and possibly best known as... (more...)

I have a lot of friends who are teachers, or want to be teachers, or are studying to be teachers. I’m even considering it myself. The funny thing about this decision to cross the line of identity from... (more...)

The Ford Amphitheatre, located not a stone’s throw away from the Hollywood Bowl off the 101, is a good venue to stage a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or possibly Into the Woods. The sandstone... (more...)

I have mixed feelings about Rent. On one hand, the wildly popular, Tony Award-winning musical turned major motion picture seems to have climaxed to the level of bubbly pop non-sense—Joey Fatone playing... (more...)

The Edition Jacob Samuel exhibition, titled “Outside the Box,” celebrates LACMA and the Hammer Museum’s joint acquisition of the collection of 43 print portfolios produced by Jacob Samuel in... (more...)

Director Serge Bromberg meets a woman named Inès de Gonzalez in a broken, Parisian elevator. The two get to talking, and Bromberg learns that she is actually the widow of famed French director, Henri-Georges... (more...)

Late July and we’re knee-deep in festival season. You’ve likely hit a few events from the Slamdance, the LA Film Fest, the Fringe Fest, Outfest, Comic-Con, the Middle Eastern Comedy Fest, Lilith Fair…the... (more...)

Jazz remains one of the few indigenous, American art forms, in that nothing quite like it ever existed before Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton started mixing up ragtime with the blues in an early 1900’s... (more...)

I’m about to move neighborhoods in Los Angeles. I realize this information is of interest to very few people, and even then, of very little interest. But for the past two years, I’ve lived in the... (more...)

http://www.spike.com/video/2828991Bactrian camels, Arctic wolves, Pakistani snow leopards, oceanic whitetip sharks, and one coat-tailed conductor; that’s a lot to pack in anywhere, even the Hollywood... (more...)

Lately, the long-revered tradition of the sequel in cinema has been replaced by the newer concept of the reboot (Batman, Star Trek, Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Hulk, etc.) Audiences are expected to... (more...)

DRKnight66: Inception comes out today! RollinWitNolan40: Oh man, it’s gonna be so sweet. DRKnight66: It’s gonna be like The Dark Knight meets Memento meets awesome! RollinWitNolan40: Are you taking... (more...)

I first caught wind of John Lurie as the stubborn, stone-faced proto-hipster in Jim Jarmusch’s essential, second feature, Stranger Than Paradise. In this film, the life of his character, Willie, is... (more...)

In the underrated classic Los Angeles film L.A. Story, Steve Martin fails to get a reservation at L’Idiot, a fictional hot L.A. restaurant with a line out the door, ticker tape reading the income level... (more...)

What is a hipster sense of humor? Surely it has something to do with irony—the hipster’s original sin—or at least the thin version of irony that exists in wearing a D.A.R.E. t-shirt, while smoking... (more...)

At around 4:00 PM on Sunday, June 27th, Guy Hatzvi of Farmlab, in association with Metabolic Studio, was rushing down to Marina Del Rey to find a replacement pump for the installation project entitled... (more...)

After unknowingly attempting to attend a film during the release of the new Twilight Saga movie, Eclipse at the Arclight in Hollywood last night I was shocked to find the parking garage closed with a... (more...)

Gregory Crafts’s play Friends Like These, which had a brief, successful run at the first-ever Hollywood Fringe Festival, is a smart, brooding possum of a show. I say this because it initially plays... (more...)

Fireworks have the ability to conjure up about as many disparate meanings and memories as the number of spokes in their shooting spiral light displays. In China, they’re thought to scare away evil spirits.... (more...)

The more and more I examine the arts in the context of a historical structure, the more I realize what a bummer of a time this is for civic art. I can’t think of another era that feels as devoid of... (more...)

This past Saturday, June 19th, three different art shows opened at 510 Bernard Street in Chinatown, a sure-fire sign of a gallery space—and beyond that, a part of town—that’s gaining more and more... (more...)

I wrote about the Los Angeles Film Fest last year, and made a day-by-day list of the movies and events I was looking forward to go see (as evidenced by this link). And while I would love to do the same... (more...)

Along with many other lucky visitors last week, I got a chance to see the inside of the brand new, as yet un-opened Resnick Pavilion, the latest addition to the already massive LACMA campus. The 45,000... (more...)

Ladies and Gentlemen: Please get yourselves down to the Nuart and quick. I didn’t realize it until it was almost too late, but since the 11th they’ve been screening, daily, the five-part masterpiece... (more...)

In the early 1960’s, special operatives from the CIA secretly recruited and trained over a quarter of the Hmong people—a minority ethnic group who lived in the mountains of Laos and were known for... (more...)

In 1985, world-renowned Greek art collector Dakis Joannou acquired One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank after viewing the work at Jeff Koons’s “Equilibriums” exhibition in the Lower East Side in... (more...)