I myself haven’t been to hundreds of shows this year.  But as a weekly contributor to Fine Arts LA, I have been privy to some of the best art this crazy city has to offer, and I wasn’t limited to one medium.  I saw plays, movies, photography exhibits, I even flirted with the perils of a natural disaster, and thus… my top ten:

10. “Sam Cherry: Photographs of Charles Bukowski, the Black Cat, and Skid Row”

Representing one half of the double exhibit entitled “Bukowski and Burroughs” that went up in early April at the Track 16 Gallery, this series of simple photographs succeeded in portraying what none of these phantasmagoric, apocalyptic fantasy movies can pull off: it showed an old, self-destructive man, reflecting back on the good times he’s had, proud yet regretful, strong yet weak.

9. Ken Tanaka’s “Maximum Pleasant”

Ken Tanaka is one artist/performer/youtube-phenomenon I was lucky enough to interview.  His show at the Billy Shire Fine Arts Gallery back in May included videos, paintings, drawings, music, and even a fully functional garage sale.  But it neither the media mash-up that impressed me about Ken nor even his possible double identity.  It was his sense of pure pleasure in creation, his contagious childlike sense of comedy that emanates off his pieces, and made for one of the smiley-est art openings I’ve seen in LA.

8. Landscaping the Den of Saints

It’s easy to skip over small, live theatre in Los Angeles, especially when it’s a three-hour meditation on the ideas of success and ambition like Jacob Smith’s recent, original production at the Avery Schreiber Theatre.  But sometimes you miss out on gems, and this play took on the issue of being young and hungry in Los Angeles, and ended up representing the struggle with a sense of playful accuracy.  And actor Sean Fitzgerald deserves some sort of award for his transformative performance.

7. Visioneers

This film, which is now up on Netflix instant-play, began its distribution independently.  And I mean independently.  I saw Visioneers at the Echo Park Film Center, when it was traveling around to any screen that would take it, and I have to say that it stuck with me.  Starring the still-underrated Zack Galifianakis, the movie is about spontaneous combustion in a futuristic, corporate-run society, where giving someone the middle finger is a sign of respect.  Every time I enter an office building, I think of the bearded Galifianakis flicking me off with a smile.

6. Gavin Bunner’s “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”

Another interviewee, the friendly Mr. Bunner isn’t afraid to dress in a cardboard Moby Dick costume and compete in a public boxing match against a Berenstein Bear.  Sure it seems silly, but it’s emblematic of what this young, promising painter is attempting to capture and celebrate in his work: the absurd convergence of pop and pomp in our Google-ingrained brains.

5. Lie of the Mind

I only saw this play last week, so it might just be a fresh lie of my own mind, but Studio Five Productions’ latest show, which you can still catch until the 19th at the Studio/Stage Theatre, is a brave and forceful retelling of Sam Shepard’s original, 1985 story.  The actors are physical and fierce, the music is haunting, the makeup is extraordinary, and the set is like something Jason Schwartzman’s character would dream up in Rushmore.

4. David Lynch’s “Dark Night of the Soul”

I was always wary about David Lynch, didn’t really understand where most of his films were coming from.  Then I moved to Los Angeles and saw his photography show at the Kohn Gallery in June.  His series of photographs, which he did in collaboration with musical artists Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, displayed a keen sense of that eerie, ghostly feeling you sometimes get when you’re driving in LA at night.  Lynch’s images have the ability to glue themselves onto your subconscious.

3. The Walworth Farce

Enda Walsh, the writer of this absurd, tragic, and hilarious “farce,” is a force to be reckoned with in the theatre world.  This play, which ran at the Freud Playhouse at UCLA last month, has garnered worldwide praise, and for good reason.  Like Beckett at his best, it manages to make complete insanity understandable and heartfelt.  All actors should try to see this production for a glimpse of what hard work looks like on stage.

2. The Seafarer

Speaking of Beckett and the Irish, this Tony-nominated show written by Connor McPherson employs the basic set-up of Beckett’s Endgame, adds a ton of alcohol, a devil in disguise, and runs with it.  What starts off as a kind of Irish mumble core play turns quickly into an old fashioned morality tale, with the stakes as high as heaven itself.  The Geffen Playhouse played host to a run of this production in April, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not the last we’ve seen of The Seafarer.

1. Fire at the Getty

Without a doubt, the most surreal and beautiful and frightening thing I’ve seen while working for Fine Arts LA.  On a mission to cover some photography exhibit (I forget, to be honest) at the Getty, I was halted by a work of God’s art: a raging fire no more than a quarter of a mile away from the museum’s premises.  Yet the truly incredible part of it was the reaction of the Getty’s patrons.  Only in Los Angeles can you sip coffee on a terrace and carry on a conversation about Russian folk art while a natural catastrophe threatens to burn you to pieces in the background.