Columns - General

Quest for Friar

By Charlie Schroeder — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 02:09:00 GMT

Photograph by Drew Fellman

I came to L.A. from New York for pilot season in 2003. I was 30 at the time, not a kid but still young enough to get excited about being allowed onto a studio lot. After my audition (“Delivery Guy,” nailed it), I wandered around Paramount’s sun-splashed campus and brushed shoulders with a blond woman wearing little more than false eyelashes and an air of confidence. As I admired her tan, I thought of my friends back in New York who were buried under a mountain of snow. For a minute I felt guilty about my good fortune, then just as quickly got over it and headed to Griffith Park to play golf.

Later, as I munched on a “Number Three, Animal-Style” at the Burbank In-N-Out while taking in the swirling peach sunset through the window, I realized that I’d just had the greatest day any human has had since the beginning of recorded time. Five months later I was unloading my things from a U-Haul into an apartment in Atwater Village.

The bliss didn’t last long. Within a few weeks the 1980s vibe of my apartment complex

and the town’s pervasive strip mall sprawl stood in stark contrast to my series of prewar New York apartments and the 18th-century log cabin that was my childhood home in Pennsylvania. There’s something unsettling about arriving in a city that’s too new; it’s an unmoored feeling. Many cities are like an urban Grand Canyon, with a majestic vastness of layer upon layer of brick, stone, and concrete built over centuries. It’s proof that there was life well before you and that there will be life long after you. L.A. seemed more like a Twitter feed—a constant stream of trendy places that were instantly gratifying but ephemeral. As I wandered the city in search of the past, I started to doubt if the real thing was out there.

It was, but it took me seven years to find it.

Cut to 2010, when I stood in a crowded elevator en route to my publishing job (hey, an actor has to make a living), with my body smooshed against the inspection certificate on the wall. I spotted the city’s seal with tiny, faded lettering: “Founded 1781.” I squinted. Must be a misprint. I had never encountered much of anything that dated back to 1881, let alone 1781. The city I thought began with Googie architecture had been founded just five years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I had no idea. Even more embarrassing, I had already spent months traveling the country to research a book about the culture of historical war reenactors, from modern-day Confederate soldiers in Florida to politically correct (if that’s possible) Nazis in Colorado. Yet I hadn’t ever looked in my own backyard.

I began checking out every library book I could find on the origin stories of L.A. I learned about pobladores, the term for L.A.’s original 44 settlers, for instance. Then there was Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who may not have a holiday like Christopher Columbus does but who was the first European to navigate much of California. He even made a pit stop in present-day San Pedro and Santa Monica in 1542. There were stories about the native Tongvas and blow-by-blow accounts of the 1846 Battle of Dominguez. Chock-full of fascinating factoids, I started proudly referring to myself as an Angeleno. Seriously, go onto Facebook. It’s all right there on my Timeline.

But it was after a lunch of Chinese food in San Gabriel that I discovered my mission. My wife, Wendy, and I drove past a small beige sign that boasted city with a mission. At first I thought it was another one of those unfortunate mottoes dreamed up by a planning committee, until we stumbled upon the Moorish-style adobe for which the city and valley were named. Constructed in 1771, the San Gabriel Mission is one of the oldest in California’s so-called Mission Ladder, a chain of religious outposts built to extend Spain’s reach into the New World and convert natives into tax-paying Christian subjects. (OK, that part isn’t so cool.) Mass has been performed there every day since it was founded. Smell the incense.

As the faint sounds of a recorded service filtered into the courtyard, I felt—finally!—as if I’d stepped back into another century. I wanted to share my historical revelations with anyone who wasn’t aware of our rich past. (I learned later that every fourth grader in L.A. has to do a mission report, but the material was all new to me.) I needed to confront the masses with my knowledge about the Masses—but how? Then I stopped in front of a sealed glass case with a Franciscan friar’s habit, sandals, rope belt, and walking staff. I knew what I had to do.

/ / / /

It’s a cool Saturday morning outside of the San Gabriel Mission, and I’m wearing an “Adult Monk Costume” I bought online and a pair of beat-up Velcro sandals from Rockport, clutching a green aluminum Coleman walking stick I purchased at Sports Authority. The night before, my barber, Loreta, carved a hideous “Friar Chuck” bald spot on top of my head, revealing a pasty crown of skin that had never seen daylight. Ever. I also have a sheaf of DIY pamphlets on L.A. history that I will hand out to anyone I encounter on my 26.8-mile journey.

Yes, that’s right: 26.8 miles. You see, a couple hundred years ago, the friars trekked between missions, in this case from San Gabriel to San Fernando, when the area was scrubland and the L.A. River flowed sans cement. Their path was the Camino Real, or King’s Highway, which is now a good chunk of the 101 freeway. Since that would mean certain death for me, my route starts on the sinewy sidewalk outside the San Gabriel Mission and leads past the affluent suburbs of San Marino, through the tree-lined streets of South Pasadena, down smog-choked Colorado Boulevard, around the corporate office towers of Glendale, and up the broad, boring stretch of Glenoaks. There is no donkey to lug gear or fellow padres to protect me from hostile natives, as the friars probably had, but I have enlisted a few Sherpa-like friends working in rotating five-mile shifts to carry my backpack filled with energy bars, water, a cell phone, ibuprofen, blister cream, muffins, freshly baked bread, and hiking shoes. (The sandals will start giving me blisters around mile six.)

The first potential convert I spot is a yuppieish fortysomething in San Marino. He holds a cup of coffee in one hand and an L.A. Times in the other. I clear my throat and proffer a flyer, but he raises his hand and walks away. I feel dejected but shrug it off. After all, his hands were full. Next a blond speed-walker races toward me, her arms by her sides like wings.

“Greetings, would you like a fl—?” I ask.

“No! No!” she says, flapping away.

Around that time a car passes by and the driver crosses herself. Another woman walks by me and mutters, “God bless you.”

I catch a glimpse of myself in a Lilly Pulitzer storefront and realize, I may have seriously miscalculated. People think I’m a Hare Krishna or a total freak. They think this is for real—and it’s not working. So I change my approach. When I hit Eagle Rock, I spy some glassy-eyed hipsters coming off an all-night trip. I greet them with 21st century irreverence. “Whoo-hoo!” I holler, dancing up to them and announcing my wacky reenactment. They dig it and gleefully caress my bald spot. From then on I take the experiment in stride. It starts to become fun. Then it becomes painful.

Nine hours and 19 miles in, my feet, legs, back, and mental faculties surrender. I read somewhere that Junipero Serra, the founder of the California missions, owned exactly one worldly possession: a collapsible bed he took with him on these treks. Have to say I can’t blame him. I stop along the sidewalk behind the Burbank airport and, bent over in agony, I hear a puttering sound. Jay Leno cruises past me in one of his antique cars. If I possess the energy, I can reach out and poke him with my stick. But I don’t.

Through my haze I realize we are both lovers of the past, Leno and I, in the middle of our own historical reenactment. Only Jay’s includes sporting a denim work shirt and steering an open-air, steam-powered car, and I’m a sunburned phony friar trapped inside a smelly brown robe. He gives me a bemused look, which I choose to take as a sign from the comedy gods: It is time to call it quits. I wearily tap out my wife’s cell phone number and moan something about picking me up. Fifteen minutes later she and I are reunited, and I give her a big hug. I imagine it probably looks creepy—a friar locked in a long, romantic embrace with a woman—but I don’t care. My arms and legs have cramped up, and I can’t let go.

Did my efforts persuade anyone to Google pobladores when they got home that day? Probably not, but I limped away with a stronger connection to L.A. (and a final chapter for my book). Even now from the 18th floor of my new apartment in Hong Kong, I’m reminded of what Alta California governor Pio Pico once said: “The more you know about a place you live, the more you care about it.” OK, it was actually my friend Krissy who said that, but it’s true. In a town where people make a living out of making up stories, the most important tales are the real ones waiting to be discovered.

Charlie Schroeder is the author of Man of War: My Adventures in the World of Historical Reenactment.

Caught Getting Creative

By Amy Wallace — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:08:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy of twitter.com/jonahlehrer

Here’s what we thought we knew about Jonah Lehrer: Only 31 years old and dweebishly handsome—nerd-hip Clark Kent glasses below a flop of hair—he wasn’t just clever; he was supremely prolific. In addition to writing for Wired, the temple of wonk, he was contributing to The New Yorker, bantering expertly with Stephen Colbert, and “appearing” on Radiolab, the WNYC show that explains everything in a darling kind of way. Armed with an Ivy League degree in neuroscience, Lehrer had a brain that clearly functioned at a higher level than other people’s, propelling him to pop-intellectual stardom in less than a decade.

More than a mere scribbler, Lehrer was a brilliant personality who soothed us with his easy command of the very complex. He wrote best-selling books—first 2007’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, then two others in rapid succession. Encountering Lehrer in his off-hours only cemented the impression that he was, indeed, living the life—hiking Runyon Canyon in the afternoons with his pretty wife and sweet-faced baby, returning (fitter than when they began) to their expensive architectural gem of a house once owned by the photographer Julius Shulman. By example, Lehrer seemed to prove that youth is more vigorous, there is an explanation for everything, and you really can have it all.

At least that was the story line until this summer. First, in July Lehrer admitted to (and apologized for) plagiarizing himself by repurposing some of his past work in supposedly fresh blog posts for The New Yorker. Many journalists saw this as a misdemeanor (one likened it to stealing food from your own refrigerator). A few weeks later, though, Lehrer was approached by Michael C. Moynihan, a writer and editor who was doing a piece for Tablet, an online magazine that calls itself “A New Read on Jewish Life.” Moynihan, a self-described aficionado of all things Bob Dylan, had discovered a couple of unfamiliar quotes from the legendarily press-shy bard in the first chapter of Lehrer’s latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Since Lehrer acknowledged he’d never interviewed Dylan, Moynihan wanted to know where the quotes came from. The answer, it turned out, was Lehrer’s imagination.

It wasn’t as if Lehrer’s faux quotes were especially juicy. Mostly he altered or fused together existing statements uttered in other contexts to support his thesis. For instance, Lehrer had Dylan sum up the creative process this way: “It’s a hard thing to describe. It’s just this sense that you got something to say.” Dylan never said that. In another passage Lehrer took a remark Marianne Faithfull had made to a writer (referring to how Dylan responded—“a little tantrum of genius”—to her rebuffing his romantic advances) and altered its meaning: Lehrer said Dylan was frustrated by songwriting, not by women.

Moynihan reported that when Lehrer finally stopped dodging him and sending him down blind alleys, the author fessed up. “I couldn’t find the original sources,” Lehrer said. “I panicked. And I’m deeply sorry for lying.” But after Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker and his publisher pulled Imagine off the shelves, umbrage in the Twittersphere only grew. Jonah Lehrer was an imposter! A pretender! An actor! Instead of breaking with L.A. stereotypes (it had felt good to say the City of Angels had a resident big thinker, its own Malcolm Gladwell), he turned out to be fulfilling them with so much fakery. Not even his “crime” showed much creativity.

That’s what is puzzling: Lehrer must have known he’d likely be found out. Making up Dylan quotes is the journalistic equivalent of poking a stick into a hive of angry bees. When plotting a deception of this sort, wouldn’t it have been prudent to quote someone completely obscure? Or someone with logorrhea, whose words are nearly impossible to track because of their sheer volume? Choosing an icon who rarely gives interviews, each of them the subject of worshipful study by his fans, seems pathologically self-destructive. It reminds me of a remark an LAPD officer made about how, if criminals were true masterminds, they probably wouldn’t be resorting to lawbreaking in the first place. His colleagues’ term for this knack people have for making such revealing and incriminating mistakes? “Felony stupid.”

Depending on which analysis you read after Lehrer’s fall, his falsification and decontextualization of Dylan quotes was evidence of the culture’s overvaluing of genius, or of big ideas that explain things too simply, or of wunderkinds in general. There were observations about hubris and schadenfreude. There were grim tweets that illustrated both. (“Jonah Lehrer is a modern day Icarus. Flew too close to Gladwell,” read one from the blog the Native Angeleno, referring to Lehrer’s colleague at The New Yorker.) There were Web essays from Salon and Slate and Forbes and The Atlantic about how ironic it was that magazines fact-check material while book publishers don’t, about how the cult of “boy wonders” such as Lehrer bespeaks an underlying sexism in magazine and book publishing, and about how hard it is to do the basic work of real journalism.

By the time the inevitable interviews appeared with Gladwell (“I am heartbroken”) and with Jayson Blair (the infamous former fabulist reporter for The New York Times speculated on Lehrer’s probable “relief” at getting caught), the frenzy had already been nicely captured by Tyler Dukes, the managing editor of Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab. Dukes tweeted a picture that he headlined “Everything being written about @JonahLehrer right now, all summed up.” It was a photo of Gene Wilder as the top-hatted, purple suit-wearing Willy Wonka, with this caption: “No, please. Tell me more about how Jonah Lehrer’s downfall fits your preconceived narrative about what’s wrong with media culture.”

Was Lehrer just lazy? When Forbes’s John McQuaid noted that Lehrer’s deceit allowed him to avoid “the drab scutwork of journalism”—the tedium of tracking down facts—I knew exactly what he meant. In my many years as a writer, I’ve knocked on the doors of accused murderers once, twice, three, and finally four times until a family member answered and let me in (or slammed the door in my face). I’ve invested weeks scouring immigration records to prove a tangential point. I’ve camped out in subterranean courthouse archives, reading thousands of pages of documents in search of a single verifying detail. Journalism can be thrilling; it can also be a chore.

But Lehrer wasn’t simply a corner cutter. By creating an identity as a purveyor of wisdom, not only of narrative, he upped the ante on his own game. For him, success required more than telling the truth. To continue to be seen as a megathinker, he needed to introduce a fabulous new idea. Again and again and again. That pressure, it seems, was his undoing. In McQuaid’s view, Lehrer’s misbehavior is distressing “because Lehrer is more than just a journalist or even a best-selling author. He is a brand unto himself. And his fall shows what can happen when the personal brand supersedes everything else."

That journalist-as-brand phenomenon is tightly intertwined, of course, with the cult of oversimplification. As Atlantic editor Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the days after Lehrer’s dethroning, “we now live in a world where counter-intuitive bullshitting is valorized, where the pose of argument is more important than the actual pursuit of truth, where clever answers take precedence over profound questions.” He also wrote: “Great long-form journalism comes from the author’s irrepressible need to answer a question. Fictional long-form journalism comes from the writer’s irrepressible need to be hailed as an oracle.” Reading that, you could be forgiven for thinking that Coates was taking a not-so-subtle swipe at Gladwell, too.

There’s an obvious irony to the title of Lehrer’s now-tainted best-seller, Imagine. But there’s another, deeper one. Part of being a good nonfiction writer is, in fact, imagining answers before you have them. This kind of imagining helps you ask better questions. It aids you as you hone a strategy for tackling the often difficult job of finding out the truth. The essential trick, though, is to let go of those early presuppositions the instant they are disproved by real information. Certainly it seems this is partly what derailed Lehrer—that he didn’t let go. He wanted Dylan to have had tantrums about the difficulty of writing a song because that served a goal bigger than the truth. It’s easy to see how desperately Lehrer, having sought and obtained membership to the smarty-pants club, needed to prove himself worthy. Still, you can’t help but wonder how Lehrer felt as he perched on the precipice before making his career-maiming leap. Was he aware enough to be nervous? Or was he deluded by his own ambition?

When I e-mailed Lehrer to ask him, he responded right away. Despite the avalanche of coverage, he said, I was only the third person to contact him for comment. (Apparently Lehrer wasn’t the only person guilty of laziness. Or was it that a potential response from Lehrer might not jibe with what the commentariat wanted to say?) “I’m extremely tempted to correct many of the false accusations that have been made about my work in recent weeks,” he wrote before declining to answer my questions. “I’m writing something about the mistake and affair myself, if only so I can learn from the failing, and I’d prefer not to talk until my writing is done.”

Let’s be honest: Journalists and book writers everywhere have felt the panic that rises when a source doesn’t respond to repeated queries, or when our reporting isn’t supporting what we thought was our central thesis, or when a particularly grievous deadline looms. We know it is unforgivable to cross the line from nonfiction to fiction, so the vast majority of us heed our moral compasses. But we are also guided by fear. While I seriously doubt that capital punishment deters criminals from committing murder (covering prisons and death row in Georgia for a year in the late ’80s—more scut work!—vanquished that argument’s chances with me), I do think that for journalists, fear of a career implosion is a useful check-and-balance.

Not for Lehrer, though. Two other sources Lehrer cited in his book—Teller, the magician, and Milton Glaser, the graphic designer—went on to raise questions about their quotes. Then in late August another shoe dropped. At the behest of Wired, an independent investigator, Charles Seife, examined 18 of Lehrer’s blog posts and found that “all but one piece revealed evidence of some journalistic misdeed.” In an essay on Slate, Seife said he’d interviewed Lehrer at length about his findings. While Seife was not permitted to quote Lehrer’s explanations (because Wired had not told Lehrer the inquiry would be made public), the investigator concluded, “I am convinced that Lehrer has a cavalier attitude about truth and falsehood.” In Seife’s opinion, Lehrer repeatedly “plagiarized others’ work, published inaccurate quotations, printed narrative details that were factually incorrect, and failed to address errors when they were pointed out.” Wired promptly fired him.

For non-journos, Lehrer’s downfall means far less than it does to those of us who pay our bills writing nonfiction. What bugs me, most, though, is that now even more readers will believe journalists really are willing—as the saying goes—to make stuff up to sell newspapers, magazines, books. Readers will distrust writers as much as our various detractors say they should. Lehrer’s sins soil not just his own reputation but those of his fellow journalists. Yes, the planet keeps spinning and the sun still comes up. But for writers who see their jobs as uncovering the truth, it was a long, hot summer. As Bob Dylan said in “Everything Is Broken,” a song from his 1989 album, Oh Mercy, “Seem like every time you stop and turn around / Something else just hit the ground.” Imagine.

Losing Faith

By Scott Timberg — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:16:00 GMT

Kelley's More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and the Wages of Sin, 1987. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins/Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Two mannequins, looking uncomfortably like corpses, recline near a wall of black-and-white photographs from the ’70s; onstage there’s an infernal blast of cello, double bass, drums, and horns. Middle-aged hipsters in leather jackets and chunky retro glasses line up at the back of the shoe box-shaped gallery to listen. Recordings by the Los Angeles Free Music Society are for sale on a table. It’s the sort of ragged, cacophonous gathering artist Mike Kelley would have enjoyed. He was, in fact, scheduled to play drums with one of the bands on this cool, sunny Sunday in February at the Box, an art space down-town.

Kelley’s death in January—an apparent suicide involving carbon monoxide—jolted the city’s art world. It also turned the concert into an inadvertent tribute to the artist, who left behind in his Eagle Rock and Highland Park studios a significant amount of partly finished work.

Though he wrote for art journals, did performance pieces, painted, and drew, it was his found-object assemblages that attracted the most attention. Probably best known for the soiled stuffed animal on the cover of Sonic Youth’s Dirty album, Kelley was a master of the unlovely. His was an aesthetic pitched toward the messy and the inscrutable, as with a trio of pieces consisting of, among other detritus, stained blankets, cat toys, and cat food bowls on display in the memorial exhibition put together at the Museum of Contemporary Art after his death. While his creations were often forlorn—Kelley sometimes described his art as being about failure—they weren’t without humor. Day Is Done features dozens of video projections that reconstruct the rituals of school days; it’s a kind of perverse, multichannel musical constructed from high school yearbook photos, with characters that include a shy satanist, a lonely vampire, and many cheerleaders.

Artist Jim Shaw played with Kelley in the band Destroy All Monsters when they were University of Michigan undergrads and came west with him from Ann Arbor to attend CalArts in 1976. Shocked as he was by his friend’s death, Shaw wasn’t entirely surprised. Kelley was known for his bouts with despondency: The artist had been frustrated with the corporate tone of the art world and stinging from a September breakup; he’d also complained about being overwhelmed—by traffic, by business concerns, by existential questions about his purpose on the planet. “He’d been more depressed in the past, but his peaks and valleys were becoming more extreme,” says Shaw.

“Oddly enough,” notes Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, the former department head of the Art Center College of Design graduate program where Kelley taught for 21 years, “the last time Mike and I talked for more than five minutes was at a memorial. As we left we talked about how miserable it was. Mike said, ‘I certainly wouldn’t want that. I want a wake, not a memorial.’ Mike was grumpy but cheerful.”

/ / / /

knew by the time I was a teenager that I was gonna be an artist—there’s no doubt about that,” Kelley said on the PBS program Art 21. “There was nothing else for me to be.” As a kid, he fell hard for psychedelia and the underground comics of R. Crumb; he called these his first experiences with the avant-garde.

Kelley’s art often nodded to his biography—he was raised by Catholic, working-class parents outside Detroit—but he was up to more than identity politics. When it was suggested that his pieces featuring stuffed animals and craft bric-a-brac were commentaries on child abuse, the artist was equal parts amused and perplexed. “I didn’t understand what they were talking about,” he said to Interview magazine. “But when I did a bit of research, I discovered how culturally omnipresent this infatuation with child abuse was.” Repressed memory syndrome intrigued him, so he designed the sculpture Educational Complex, which he called “a model of every school I ever went to plus the home I grew up in, with all the parts I can’t remember left blank.”

The artist wasn’t focused on lush materials or technical control: Kelley was a deep-sea diver into the American unconscious, dedicated to what makes us uncomfortable. “He opened up the psyche of this culture, with its obsessions and insecurities,” says John Welchman, a UC San Diego art professor who has written extensively on Kelley. “Mike’s work was very layered. There’s something raw, but also humorous and ironic—and between those two extremes there’s half a dozen other layers.”

Kelley arrived at CalArts when conceptual artist John Baldessari and, briefly, performance artist Laurie Anderson were teaching there. He was drawn especially to performance (clothing optional). After graduating with an M.F.A., he chose not to follow in the footsteps of many great L.A. artists, from Charles Mingus and John Cage to fellow CalArts grads David Salle and Eric Fischl: He stayed in L.A. Shaw remembers that period as an art-scene lull (“Everything was under the radar”), which kept Kelley free from any artistic camp or orthodoxy and able to pursue his own vision.

Poet Amy Gerstler first encountered him around 1980, at an opening at the art space LACE, where Kelley was carrying around a volume of German Romantic poetry. “When you met him,” she says, “it didn’t matter how much art sense you had. You realized you were in the presence of something really ferocious and incandescent. He was kind of explosively charismatic. He was also scary-smart—he had a lot of energy, nervous energy.”

From the beginning Kelley wanted to be an important artist and to reach everyone. “It has to operate on multiple levels,” he said later about his work. “It has to be available to the laziest viewer on a certain level, and then on a more sophisticated level as well.” To this Catholic atheist, art was a priesthood devoted to materialist ritual.

“Mike is part of a generation of artists who really changed the world’s image of Los Angeles,” says MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, taking a break from installing the tribute show. “He became for the generation of the ’80s what Ruscha had been to the ’60s and Baldessari to the ’70s.”

That generation’s sensibility was often grim, dystopian: It’s not for nothing that Kelley was a key figure in the curator’s groundbreaking 1992 Helter Skelter survey. Kelley displayed a bookishness and a voracious, sometimes obsessive curiosity—he was fascinated with Freud’s theory of the uncanny, for instance, and produced pieces for a touring European exhibition that included polychrome figurative sculptures, film stills, cartoons, and newspaper clippings. He liked to straddle passions high and low, from B zombie movies to transgressive French writers of the 19th century to cartoons on bar napkins. “I think he saw that because the history had not been written yet and the art world here wasn’t controlled by commercial institutions,” says Schimmel, “it left enormous possibilities.”

uch of how we try to make sense of art and artists verges on cliché. But as generalizations go, critic Edmund Wilson’s notion of the wound and the bow—of the artist as a damaged, often psychologically isolated figure whose talent takes its energy from his pain—certainly resonates for an artist like Kelley. He had struggled with depression his whole life, and the manic-depressive temperament of the art world, which encourages nonstop production and leads to emotional crashes when the attention flags, only exacerbated matters. Shaw watched Kelley move from one piece to the next without pausing for breath. “Workaholism contributed to his death,” Shaw says.

A few years ago Kelley bought a modest midcentury house in South Pasadena, but his love was for the less manicured Highland Park. On those nights when he wasn’t working, friends would persuade him to head out to an opening or for drinks and cheap Mexican food. “He had a big, raspy laugh that would change pitches or tones,” recalls artist Benjamin Weissman, “a wild guffaw that shifted or rolled.” Kelley had a particular gift for dirty jokes: Schimmel remembers a dinner this past winter at which he, Kelley, and artist Chris Burden had tears in their eyes from laughing so hard.

At 57, Kelley had the graying buzz cut of an aging punk and was laboring over multiple projects, including a retrospective that begins in Amsterdam at the end of this year and arrives at MOCA in 2014. He was also partway through a project with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit to reconstruct a small-scale version of his childhood home that will serve as a community center; a layer of dungeonlike rooms below will make literal Freud’s notion of the unconscious. (Two documentary films about the house and a related mobile home will be part of this year’s Whitney Biennial, which is dedicated to Kelley.)

By the end he was a blue-chip player for Gagosian Gallery, which has become one of the wealthiest, most global art enterprises since the Vatican stopped collecting. As his energy went into his work, Kelley got deeper and deeper into something he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. “He didn’t like the big business of art,” says Welchman. “He didn’t like the elitism and the pretension. He was caught in a contradiction he was well aware of.”

When journalist Tulsa Kinney, who runs the magazine Artillery, went to interview Kelley in his office and former home off Figueroa in November, he complained about an art world increasingly driven by money and careerism. “He was stoic, disconnected, not making eye contact,” she says. “I was kind of surprised that we sat in the living room with the blinds drawn.”

On the last weekend in January some friends invited Kelley out, but he said he needed to write the text for his retrospective. That evening a contemplative Kelley went to the Welcome Inn in Eagle Rock to see his old friend Anita Pace dance at an event based on the music of John Cage and Bruce Nauman, among others. Two nights later three friends, troubled because their calls had gone unreturned, banged on his door and shined flashlights through the dark windows. Then they called the South Pasadena police, who broke in.

“We know Mike had been suffering from depression—he wasn’t the Mike we had known,” says Welchman. “And we were all trying our hardest, spending more time with him, having lunch with him, speaking on the phone with him. Mike had a lot of very close friends. But he slipped through our fingers.” Those friends bid their final farewell during a wake that even Kelley would have approved of: 24 hours long and full of strong opinions.

Show of Shows

By Scott Timberg — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

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Pacific Standard Time
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While you were sleeping, a sprawling, multi-headed cultural initiative—kick-started by $10 million in Getty money—began to take over the city, or at least its art institutions, for the next six months. Its goal is to tell stories like that of the Ferus Gallery, a maverick art space of the 1950s and ’60s that gave Andy Warhol his first show and established L.A. as an art capital just a few years after the city council declared modern art to be Communist propaganda. But the movers behind Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 want to reach beyond the pantheon of Ferus’s white-guy heroes—Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz—who have become as much a part of L.A.’s narrative as the concept of sunshine and noir was in the 1990s.

PST ’s rambling extravaganza will involve about 70 exhibitions from San Diego to Santa Barbara, Santa Monica to Palm Springs; an 11-day performance festival; college courses and symposia; oral histories of familiar and overlooked figures; and media buzz that could make it Southern California’s most sweeping visual arts program ever. Each organization is focusing on a different aspect of the story—LACMA on design, the Hammer on black artists, the Norton Simon on printmaking (see the sidebar on page 94). It makes you wonder, though: Does Los Angeles—whose art scene now commands international respect, with market prices to match—need this kind of extravaganza? Lyn Kienholz, fourth wife of Ed Kienholz—the Ferus cofounder whose confrontational installations almost sparked a riot when they appeared in his 1966 show at the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art—is unambiguous. “We’re really hot all over the world. Europe is one thing. But local people don’t know shit. Or they don’t care. You talk to young kids out of art school and they say, ‘Who’s that?’ ”

With the late UCLA professor and curator Henry Hopkins, she approached the Getty Foundation nearly a decade ago, insisting on the importance of documenting the scene for posterity, and was about as subtle as her husband had been. “We just got pushy,” she recalls. Kienholz and Hopkins wrangled a grant from the Getty Foundation that led to two years of chronicling the often undersung story of L.A. art. “As artists and gallery directors died, their papers were being discarded,” says the foundation’s Joan Weinstein. Before long this scholarly pursuit—revenge of the archivists—had become a blowout, with a much larger jolt of Getty money and some corporate sponsorship. “We think it’s important to understanding modern art in the 20th century,” she says, calling the West Coast lineage “an alternate history.”

Compared to surfboards and motorcycles or a papier-mâché couple petting in the back of a Dodge or an artist gleefully urinating on his audience—all key elements of the era’s art scene—cardboard boxes full of old papers seem a little, ah, dry. But in the kind of paradox Kafka would savor, those unread documents gave rise to this region-spanning effort.

*****

Telling the tale of postwar art in California without the Ferus guys is like talking about ’60s music without mentioning the Beatles. The city was still a frontier in those days: The lack of a visual arts infrastructure—museums, established dealers, critical discourse—made it easier for a bunch of outcasts and eccentrics to redraw the cultural map. Walter Hopps, the curator-genius who steered the gallery in its radical early days, originally supported his art habit by working as a psych-ward orderly. Kienholz lived, as he put it, “on the fringes of society, like a termite,” so poor that he bartered a painting for the removal of an aching tooth. Irwin made his money winning dance contests—the lindy mostly—and betting on horses. Billy Al Bengston was so broke that he couldn’t afford a battery for his car: The art school dropout parked his ’37 Pontiac facing downhill, nose toward the Malibu surf, so he could roll-start it.

This gang helped make L.A. a credible alternative to New York as a place where a serious artist could conduct a career. After various arrivals and departures, Ferus members would become some of the brightest stars of the art world: The mid-’60s painting, Burning Gas Station, a dramatic pop art canvas by Ed Ruscha (known in humbler times as “Waterboy”), sold in 2007 for a hair under $7 million. Fascinated with surf and hot rod culture, they were the first bad boys of an art movement that would be defined by a certain anti-intellectual machis-mo and a fixation on the sensuality of light.

In the short term, Pacific Standard Time will amount to a string of shows, loosely coordinated and grouped into events such as “regional weekends” that will allow people to consume, for instance, all the offerings in Pasadena or the Westside in one fell swoop. Certain exhibitions have had culture vultures drooling since early summer, including It Happened at Pomona, which looks at how a small liberal arts college incubated some of the most risk-taking art in America. (A morals crackdown in the ’70s broke up the band.) A physically (and conceptually) enormous show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego will present an extensive collection of Light and Space art ever assembled, including sumptuous pieces by Irwin, James Turrell, and De Wain Valentine.

MOCA’s chief curator, Paul Schimmel—the man behind Ecstasy: In and About Altered States and Robert Rauschenberg: Combines—has put together a compre-hensive show, Under the Big Black Sun, which reassesses the often denigrated 1970s through more than 200 pieces. It explores such subjects as feminist art, ethnic and racial identity, and the kind of explicitly political art that was scarce in the previous decade. “In the history of art you have the ‘on’ decades,” says Schimmel. The ’60s had hipster sex appeal, and the ’80s saw L.A. art busting out internationally. But what Schimmel calls the “off” decades can be more significant as well as more mysterious. We associate the period with an explosion of feminist, Chicano, and black artists, but that’s hardly the whole story. “We barely know anything about the ’70s,” Schimmel maintains. “It’s not a whole lot less confusing 40 years on than it was at the time,” he says. “People were still looking for the next big art movement, but by the end they realized the Next Big Thing was that there would not be a Next Big Thing.” Art history’s linear path fragmented into gender-, ethnic-, and other personally based subgenres. Says Schimmel, “People stopped believing in the idea of the avant-garde.”

*****

Even people excited about the city’s art history have second thoughts about Pacific Standard Time. Dave Hickey, the ornery and brilliant Las Vegas-based culture critic and longtime champion of West Coast art, sees no need for a scholarly driven, top-down variety show on Southern California art. “It’s a sign of insecurity. The city can go right on without all this. I think L.A. is fine.”

Art critic Peter Plagens, who wrote Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-1970, the key book on the period, hears an admission of sorts in the program’s very name. “You’d never have to do something in New York called ‘Eastern Standard Time,’ ” he says. “Is it essentially and inherently provincial for L.A. to be even doing Pacific Standard Time? I don’t know.”

In fact, a number of ironies gather around Pacific Standard Time. One is that here is a massive, chest-puffing art event that has virtually nothing to do with Eli Broad, the city’s chief cultural patron. Another is that its local boosterism is often in the service of artists whose work was subversive to the values of chamber of commerce L.A. It’s like the British government funding a tourist attraction dedicated to the biting, skeptical songs of the Jam, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols.

Perhaps the greatest irony, though, is that the most ambitious initiative to date on contemporary Los Angeles art is helmed by the Getty, an institution that has displayed only limited interest in contemporary art or Los Angeles itself. The vaguely 23rd-century-looking Brentwood campus is considered by many in the art world to be somewhere between a classroom bully and a hall monitor: Its leadership scandals—Barry Munitz’s high living, a history of plundering antiquities—are hard to forget, and the Getty Center’s location “at the top of the hill,” looking down on the teeming city, has generated resentment since before its 1997 opening.

While there’s been some low-level your-logo-is-bigger-than-mine grousing—along with competition for various works and for attention—among institutions, everyone seems to be playing well together so far. Of course there’s still plenty of time for bad blood to develop, but to optimists the city’s museums have hit a golden mean—both mature and symbiotic. “In other periods or in other cities,” says Schimmel, “you might have some institutions crushing others when it comes to loans of work.” The Getty’s role, though, is enough to turn some people against the entire effort. “The Getty’s standing among L.A. art institutions is about as low as it can get,” says Hickey. “I think they did this to buy their way into the good graces of the L.A. art world. And I don’t think it’s gonna work.”

Whatever the local reputation of the Getty, Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh of the Getty Research Institute re-sem-ble neither schoolyard bullies nor hall monitors. Both New York transplants, they’ve worked on a project about Harry Smith, the eccentric polymath best known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, and they idolize the late jazz photographer William Claxton. They’re curators for the Getty’s overview show, Crosscurrents, and important forces in getting the research institute to wag the giant, slow-moving Getty dog.

Perchuk, who wears a goatee and chunky glasses, recalls how as a grad student at Yale in the ’90s he told his department he wanted to focus on postwar L.A. art. Only Tom Crow, a farsighted art historian who later ran the Getty Research Institute, was sympathetic. “The other members of the faculty sat down and said, ‘We really doubt there is enough good art there for one dissertation,’ ” Perchuk says. He keeps track of the disses aimed at the local scene (even the 2006 Centre Pompidou show, Los Angeles 1955-1985: Birth of an Art Capital, referred to “the provincial art scene of the 1950s and 1960s”). He also points out that the notion of L.A. as a cultural wasteland was kept alive by the artists themselves. “Because it’s like, ‘I was a pioneer in the wilderness,’ ” he says.

Singh, a former assistant to Allen Ginsberg, playfully shakes her curly head of hair for emphasis. “It would be great,” she says in a rush, “for people to walk out and say, ‘There was a lot of cool shit that was made here’—in response to things I see every day when I drive to work or when I go to Santa Monica on the weekends. ” These artists were inspired not by Renaissance icons or the neurotic emotions of abstract expressionism but by elements from custom-car and surf culture—part of the pop culture of our time and place.

Of course, it’s impossible to predict what exactly people will come away with after all those millions are spent. Exhibitions—even hyped-up ones—close, and then they’re just memories. As good as parts of it were, most people don’t recall LACMA’s Made in California initiative, which opened in 2000 with high expectations.

Pacific Standard Time, however, will have very tangible long-term impact. Not only has the Getty Research Institute begun to assemble an archive of the period, but PST will produce more than 25 catalogs featuring reproductions of the work as well as the one thing L.A. culture has, for better and for worse, lacked: a substantial body of criticism. (Plagens’s Sunshine Muse remains, almost 40 years after its publication, the most authoritative record of postwar West Coast art, although Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s new Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s makes a gossipy, wonderfully readable sidebar.)

Those boxes, sitting in the corner or on their way to the Dumpster, are being opened, and there are more than just words in them. They contain the contradictory-seeming ambiguities of John Baldessari, the serene light experiments of Doug Wheeler, the dry-ice art-in-the-mind of Ed Ruscha, the patriarchy-smashing of Judy Fiskin, the found-art assemblages of the black artists who coalesced after the Watts riots, and a lot more—with a soundtrack by Charles Mingus and Art Pepper. They’ve got not just the T-shirts and shades of the Ferus studs but dashikis and dreadlocks and burning bras. There’s a lot of nasty stuff, too, and maybe some hope at the bottom.

Header photographs by top row (from left): Artists’ Tower, 1966, Charles Brittin and Mark Di Suvero, Getty Research Institute/© J. Paul Getty Trust; It Terrifies Me..., 1980, Raymond Pettibon, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Sad Girl, 1979, John Valadez, Lena Torslow Hansen Collection, Los Angeles/© John Valadez; Chocolate and Young Men, c. 1990-1993, Beatrice Wood, Dr. and Mrs. William P. Klein collection, Newport Beach, CA/© Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts/Happy Valley Foundation; Free Richard Mohawk and Paul Skyhorse, 1976-78, Dave “Buffalo” Greene/© Peace Press. Second row (from left): An intermedia performance at CalArts, 1983, CalArts Archive; Elephant, 1945, Charles and Ray Eames, Eames Collection LLC/© The Eames Foundation; City of Angels, 1983, Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York/© Marina Abramovic; In Mourning and in Rage, 1977, Leslie Labowitz Starus and Suzanne Lacy/courtesy of artist; Judy Chicago, from the first Feminist Studio Workshop brochure, 1973, photographer unknown, Woman’s Building Image Archive at Otis College of Art and Design/© The Woman’s Building. third row (from left): La Chaise, 1948, date of this example, 1996, Charles Eames and Ray Eames, Eames Collection LLC/© Eames Office LLC; La Mexicana Market, C. 1970s, Oscar Castillo/ © Oscar Castillo; Black Girl’s Window, 1969, Betye Saar/Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York; Oxnard Madame, 1961, Matsumi “Mike” Kanemitsu, Japanese American National Museum/© Japanese American National Museum; Number 4, 1968, Karl Benjamin, Huntington Library Art Collections. Bottom row (from Left): Untitled, 1965, John Altoon, Norton Simon Museum/© 2010 Estate of John Altoon; Scene from Ashes and Embers, 1982, directed by Haile Gerima, UCLA Film & television Archive; freeway, 1966, vija celmins, j. paul getty museum; Olvera Street Grocery Store, Not dated, Jake Lee, Chinese American Museum Collection; Untitled, 1972, Hirokazu Kosaka, courtesy of artist

Show of Shows: Open House

By Matthew Segal — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

As part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Pacific Standard Time show California Design, 1930 to 1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” the living room of Charles and Ray Eames’s Case Study House #8 is being re-created in the Resnick Pavilion. A masterpiece of midcentury modernism, the couple’s Pacific Palisades home has remained largely unaltered since they built it in a bluff-top meadow in 1949. The Eames Foundation agreed to allow the home’s contents to be moved for the exhibition while maintenance is performed on the structure. Because tours of the home’s interior are infrequent, the show marks a rare opportunity for a close-up. Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Charles and Ray, offers some details:

Thonet chair: “The design dates from the late 1800s, early 1900s. That chair was as much a breakthrough in mass production as the Eames molded plywood chair was years later. They admired it as an object and a chair.” Bookcase: Freestanding, it’s made of wood and aluminum. “The board at the back of each shelf is loose so that you can move it if your books are deeper.” Artwork: A photograph of a Franz Kline painting. George Nelson lamp: “George Nelson was of course a good friend of theirs. He was the head of design at Herman Miller. He was the one who saw the Eames show at the Museum of Modern Art and told Miller that this was the future of his company.” Balcony: “Their bedroom is up there. They used sliding panels as a way to offer privacy and give flexibility.” Tumbleweed: “They collected that on their honeymoon.” LACMA is using a stand-in. Built-in sofa: “The seat is extremely low and gives you this great perspective out toward the meadow.” LACMA is using a reproduction. Coffee table: “They made it especially for themselves in the early ’50s. It’s gold leaf on top of brass with wooden dowel legs.” Pillows: The pillows were a gift from their friends Amanda Dunne and her husband, Philip, who wrote the screenplay for How Green Was My Valley. Bird: “They obtained it in the 1940s. We believe it was Appalachian in origin and a decoy of some kind.” Floor: LACMA is re-creating the floor with vinyl tiles; the original linoleum in the Palisades will be replaced during the exhibition as the house undergoes other repairs. » California Design, 1930 to 1965: “Living in a Modern Way” runs from October 1 through March 25.

Show of Shows: Across the Pacific

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

1. Pomona College Museum of Art

Claremont
It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973. Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona, August 30 to November 6; Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona, December 3 to February 19; Part 3: At Pomona, March 10 to May 13

2. Getty Center
Brentwood
Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, October 1 to February 5

3. Santa Monica Museum of Art
Santa Monica
Beatrice Wood: Career Woman—Drawings, Paintings, Vessels, and Objects, September 10 to March 3

4. Hammer Museum
Westwood
Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980, October 2 to January 8

5. Norton Simon Museum of Art
Pasadena
Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California, October 1 to April 2

6. Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Mid Wilshire
California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” October 1 to March 25

7. Otis College of Art and Design
Los Angeles
Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, October 1 to January 28

8. Museum of Contemporary Art/ Geffen Contemporary
Little Tokyo
Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974-1981, October 2 to February 13

9. MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House
West Hollywood
Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design, September 28 to January 8

10. Scripps College, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery
Claremont
Clay’s Tectonic Shift: John Mason, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos, 1956-1968, January 21 to April 8

11. Autry National Center (with UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center)
Griffith Park
Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation, October 14 to January 8

12. Palm Springs Art Museum
Palm Springs
Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982, January 21 to May 27

See the full roster

He Still Matters

By Steve Erickson — Mon, 09 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The 1997 album that inaugurated the third phase (or eighth or ninth) of Bob Dylan’s career was called Time Out of Mind, evoking time older than can be remembered. More likely, though, Dylan meant that he was a man out of time. He was out of time not only in the sense of having been hospitalized with a near-fatal heart infection shortly after recording the album but in the sense of being outside the present moment. Dylan’s attempts at remaining “relevant” as a singer and songwriter in the late 1970s and the ’80s had been desperate, maybe pathetic—startling for someone who once was the very equator on the map of relevance. If you were a musical artist in the ’60s and the latitude of Dylan didn’t run through you, you might as well have gotten off the map altogether, as no less than the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the Rolling Stones concluded; and in the ’60s Dylan was so much the man of the moment that he felt trapped by the same relevance he later craved. In the last 20 years he’s shed time like skin, until being an anachronism has become a modus operandi. American music’s Flying Dutchman, he rolls from town to town to town with his band on a tour that claims to have no end, making records defiant of the calendar. Past and future leak in and out of a songbook that’s been augmented by the remarkable likes of “Highlands,” “Cold Irons Bound,” “Sugar Baby,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Thunder on the Mountain,” “Forgetful Heart,” and at least a couple of efforts, “Things Have Changed” and “Not Dark Yet,” that stand among the classics of yore.

Dylan turns 70 this month. This is 50 years after recording an unassuming debut comprising other people’s material. The first of his own songs that caught people’s attention was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a baldly paint-by-numbers attempt at a folk standard, far from the last instance that Dylan’s calculations would pay off spectacularly. Besides launching its author’s career, the song’s biggest contribution to music was inspiring Sam Cooke’s superior “A Change Is Gonna Come.” But if a lot of people could have written “Blowin’ in the Wind,” only Dylan could have written the follow-up, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” composed around the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and exposing within its topicality Dylan’s inner Baudelaire. In the amphetamine blur of the next few years came “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” culminating in the manifesto “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Fleurs du Mal of rock and roll, Blonde on Blonde. Then Dylan was either almost killed or just scraped up a bit—depending on what version of events you believe—in a motorcycle accident that sounds as suspiciously romantic as some of his other biographical embellishments, including his alleged abduction by the circus as a child, a supposed hobo existence, and his name itself.

Had Dylan perished in that accident, flaming out like James Dean, he would be a different sort of mythic character. He’d have more currency with trendsetters; instead he’s had to content himself with merely being America’s best songwriter ever, unless it’s Duke Ellington, who had help from Billy Strayhorn. The measure of Dylan’s accomplishment may be the work not of his ’60s peak but of his ’80s depths. When “Every Grain of Sand” and “Blind Willie McTell,” the latter as scary a vision of America as has been committed to melody, is what you’re coming up with at your worst, it ends the argument. Nonetheless there was a time when Dylan would have felt as embalmed by the “greatest songwriter” title as he did by the “voice of his generation” designation half a century ago, so it may be due to a new mellowing or maturity that finally he’s making his peace with it: All right, go ahead and lionize me, if you must; I can take it. The last decade has seen a social coming-out on Dylan’s part, like a debutante’s, something that would amuse the younger Dylan no end if it didn’t confound him; he wrote and published a book in 2004—a rather Dylanesque book, to be sure, in its eloquent and evasive way—called Chronicles: Volume One, which you have to assume he would have preferred to call Volume Two or Three just to mess with our linearity (unless, of course, linearity is his newest way of messing with us). He’s done a radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, and subjected himself to the interviews with documentarians who have figured out that, as Jonathan Lethem argued in a New York Times piece, living in Dylan’s time may be comparable to having lived in William Blake’s. They want to bear witness while they can.

*****

Commemorating Dylan’s birthday, the last year or so leading up to now has seen volumes on Dylan by Greil Marcus, Sean Wilentz, Clinton Heylin, and Daniel Mark Epstein, reissues of earlier biographies by Robert Shelton and Howard Sounes, tribute CDs and cover albums (though, typically, nothing from Dylan himself), a restored Blu-ray of the D.A. Pennebaker doc Don’t Look Back, and new DVDs called The Never Ending Narrative and Bob Dylan Revealed. The last is an earnest attempt to investigate Dylan, the filmmaker talking at length to some of the people around the songwriter (though, typically, not Dylan himself) and unearthing some unseen photographs; there are insightful segments about the Rolling Thunder Revue of the mid-’70s, the period of Dylan’s Christian conversion, and the famous “Royal Albert Hall” concert (that, typically, didn’t take place at the Royal Albert Hall). This was the notorious show in Manchester where Dylan was called a Judas by someone in the audience, and in response the singer hurled down the gauntlet in the form of a sonic boom. But in no way is Dylan “revealed” in Bob Dylan Revealed, because there’s not a Bob Dylan per se to reveal. By that I don’t mean there’s nothing there; I mean that his reputation as a man of many guises and incarnations, the man who had to be played by six different actors in Todd Haynes’s biopic I’m Not There, is a misleading cliché. It suggests that there’s another Dylan who takes off the mask when he goes home at night, even as any “true” Dylan gave way long ago to an artifice that says more about who Dylan is than whatever once might have been regarded as authentic. Dylan sleeps with the mask on and showers with it; the skull beneath, and the mind beneath that, have formed to fit it.

So the recent “candor,” as seen in the ’05 Martin Scorsese film No Direction Home, in which Dylan talks more openly than before, surely is as considered (and about as trustworthy) as the low profile that fascinated everyone more than any high profile could. Dylan always has fashioned himself a man “never known to make a foolish move,” as he once wrote in a song, and if you were to argue that Dylan’s foolish moves have abounded starting around 1970, he probably would have us believe that even his blunders are evidence of his genius: “Everyone hated that last album? Just the way I planned it.” The music, at least, seems spontaneous, but he’s factored “spontaneity” into the mystique, too. Don’t get me wrong—Dylan is a genius if we’ve ever seen one. But he’s also a supreme opportunist, cynical about a popularity that for much of the public feels slightly obligatory in a way that its adoration of the Beatles didn’t, ruthless in his occasional plagiarism as decried by similar megalomaniacs like Joni Mitchell, and devoted as much to the creation of Bob Dylan as to any of the ideals that his songs have expressed. He’s worked through the contradiction of finding his messianic appeal suspect and thinking he deserves it anyway; look back on his Christian years and it’s clear that he regarded Jesus not so much as a savior as a kindred spirit, the only one in human history, except maybe Elvis, who could relate to what it’s like being Bob Dylan.

Other than “blues,” “time” may be the most conspicuous word in the lexicon of Dylan’s titles, particularly over the last couple of decades. Some years after Time Out of Mind, he made an album called Modern Times; two of his finest latter-day songs are “Most of the Time” and “Born in Time” (at its loveliest as an acoustic outtake on Tell Tale Signs rather than the leaden official version on Under the Red Sky). With time’s passage, the notion of time has changed for Dylan; once the times that were famously changing belonged to the rest of us, with Dylan as time’s observer. Now time is personal, part lover and part stalker, cherished as memory and dreaded as anticipation. Being 70 will do that. “Who’s this guy you’ve spent my whole life searching for?” he seems to be asking lately. “I’m everywhere you look.” Notwithstanding his premeditations for posterity’s sake, and setting things straight while they still can be, Bob Dylan is ready to be found, or otherwise be lost for good, not only to us but himself.

Photograph courtesy bobdylan.com

School of Thought

By Kate Wolf — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

“Language is data,” says Joseph Mosconi as he begins his lecture. “The meaning doesn’t matter.”

Mostly in their midtwenties to early thirties, the students look younger. Fresh faced and dressed in an easy style—some wear tennis shoes, others high-heeled boots—they sit rapt in a circle with notebooks on their laps. If not for the soft hum of an ice machine and the strains of New Orleans jazz wafting from the cocktail lounge below, they could be in a grad school classroom. Instead they’re upstairs at the Mountain Bar, the hipster watering hole on Gin Ling Way in Chinatown whose dimly lit, bloodred interior sports voluptuous light fixtures shaped like lotus blossoms.

As Mosconi, a poet and linguist who works for Google, talks about the rigors of his previous job—creating lexicons for semantic text processing and online advertising—and how that “work-work” bears on his creative process, Piero Golia meanders in and out of the room a few times before flopping onto a low black couch. A well-known conceptual artist, he is one of the cofounders of the Mountain School of Arts, the institution—if that’s an apt term for an enterprise housed in a bar—that has made Mosconi’s lecture possible. Golia is not your typical administrator, however, and this is not your typical art school.

The 13 students present are in week two of a nonaccredited, tuition-free program that is driven only by the teachers’ and students’ desire to take part. Though its curriculum is unstructured, with no course description or syllabus in sight, an average three-month session could include nude-figure drawing with Italian contemporary artist Vanessa Beecroft, a talk by conceptual artist Dan Graham, an overnight field trip to Joshua Tree National Park to visit the “High Desert Test Sites” of sculptor and installation artist Andrea Zittel, a visit from dancer Simone Forti, and a performance by punk bassist Mike Watt. There’s just one thing these art students won’t get to do. “At the Mountain,” says artist Eric Wesley, the school’s other cofounder, “you don’t make art.”

*****

Part cultural salon, part grown-up summer camp, and perhaps—though Golia and Wesley deny it—part agitprop, the Mountain School of Arts has convened every January through March for the past five years. Twice a week during that time, 12 to 15 students gather at the Mountain Bar to consider science, philosophy, and cultural criticism. The setting is at once high- and lowbrow: The bar, the former home of Chinatown’s oldest restaurant, General Lee’s, has been renovated by the owners, artist Jorge Pardo and gallery owner Steve Hansen. (Hansen recently moved his China Art Objects Gallery, which helped reestablish Chung King Road as a destination, to Culver City.) The students, meanwhile, are culled from more than 100 applicants, some from as far away as London and Milan. They are mostly visual artists, writers, and curators or occasionally all three. But what students do outside the bar is largely beside the point, since the emphasis is not on their work. Those who wish to be considered for enrollment apply about six months before classes begin, submitting only a one-page application and a short autobiographical essay. Those who are admitted receive little advance information on courses or scheduling. After they complete the program, they receive no degree.

Because of its abstract nature it is tempting to think of the venture—whose acronym (MSA^) is adorned with a diacritical mark that’s intended to evoke a mountain peak—as more of a commentary on an art school than a school in its own right. When asked to describe the place, Wesley responds with something that seems intentionally opaque: “The Mountain School really borders on being elitist and populist. I consider myself both those things.” Though his statement poses a paradox, Wesley’s not wrong. Anybody can apply, regardless of pedigree or credentials or work sample. Once enrolled, students have a chance to meet some of the foremost artists in the world. Billed on its Web site, themountainschool
ofarts.org, as an “amendment to the university system,” this experiment—or is it more of a jab at graduate school hype?—nevertheless has a lot in common with the MFA programs it seeks to satirize or supplement. Much of the reading material is the same, and the classes are discussion based and mainly led by artists without much teaching experience.

Los Angeles is home to some of the best arts-related graduate programs in the country, boasting heavyweights like UCLA and USC, CalArts and Art Center, as well as a host of alternative educational offerings such as the Public School, Machine Project, and the former Sundown Schoolhouse. Many of these were predicated on the idea that you can teach someone to make better art. The Mountain School founders seem to disagree, stressing that if you can’t teach creativity, at least you can provide people an outlet, a way to be involved in the culture—without burdening them with a lifetime of student loans.

That’s more or less how Golia and Wesley sold the idea to the bar’s owners. The school’s purpose seems aligned with a 1960s alternative education model, while its name recalls the famous Black Mountain College, the North Carolina program initiated in the ’30s that made the study of art central to a liberal arts education. But the Mountain School’s true spiritual forebear is, according to its founders, the Italian Renaissance. Golia, who is 36, with a thick black beard, an ever-present baseball cap, and a single diamond embedded in his front tooth, has a background in chemical engineering. He came to L.A. from Naples via New York nine years ago, bringing a certain romanticism with him. Wesley, a 37-year-old part-time instructor at Otis College of Art and Design, grew up in Los Angeles and has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Biennial. His deadpan delivery would make him intimidating but for the sailor hat he often wears while brooding at the bar. Both he and Golia talk about artists as “knights questing for the Grail” and “fighter pilots.” This bravado mixes with humor in their art. A new work by Golia, installed last spring at the Standard hotel in West Hollywood, features a large white sphere on top of the building that lights up only when he’s in town. A recent show of Wesley’s at Bortolami Gallery in New York centered on riffs on the geometric ideas of René Descartes, including golf-cart-like sculptures titled D’Carts Blanche.

Once you hear this you can’t help wondering: Is the Mountain School just an elaborate performance art piece? Or worse, a vanity project? Golia and Wesley say no to both questions and maintain that it’s not about them at all. Responsibility is shared among the many participants. The shifting ranks of the school’s teachers create their own curricula, while administrative duties fall largely on “Lawrence,” a position held by a different person each year whose name remains the same no matter who’s filling it, male or female. Lawrence helps Golia and Wesley sift through applications and find the right balance for each incoming class.

It’s no surprise that a program this anarchic has detractors. In a recent article in the art magazine Frieze, an ex-student writes “…[the Mountain School’s] lack of academic accreditation and agenda might convince you it’s either a hoax or out to hammer the question: ‘How do you form a school that provokes the idea of a school?’ But MSA^ isn’t parodic; it’s just free. And, being free, the big joke is that you get what you pay for.”

*****

Amid a terrible downpour one afternoon, a group of students has gathered in Golia’s living room at his house in the Hollywood Hills. Visible through the balcony window are stilt houses jutting out of the freshly green hills and the lights from Universal City punctuating the gray afternoon with a bright lemon and emerald glow. As more students straggle in, Golia looks nervous. He is waiting for Thomas Demand, the internationally celebrated photographer, to show up for lunch.

A student named Tristan arrives, having traversed the hill from the Hollywood and Highland subway stop, a good two miles away, on foot. “I’m an Englishman; I’m not bothered by the rain,” he says as Golia fidgets, glancing at the clock. Just when it seems that the guest of honor has lost his way, he appears.

In town from Berlin to speak that night at the Hammer Museum and due to leave for Houston the next morning, Demand was only available to talk to the students over lunch. Golia regards the meal, which he’s hosting at his home because it’s more conveniently located than the bar, as a teachable moment for the students. “I want them to see that artists are normal people—they eat lunch, too,” he says in his mellifluous Neapolitan accent.

After Demand retrieves his laptop from his car, the students huddle around the table as he whips through images from his most recent exhibition, Nationalgalerie, at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In a low and calm voice he explains the show, its hanging (constructed photos on thick wool curtains), his collaborator (the famous recluse writer Botho Strauss), and the topic (Germany). Once he finishes, Golia serves some pizza, salad, and eggplant that he prepared himself.

Between bites Demand discusses a lecture series he arranged in conjunction with his exhibition titled How German Is It? that included such speakers as architect Rem Koolhaas, BMW chief designer Adrian van Hooydonk, and Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen. Demand notes that the dialogue addressed everything from German politics to film but never his artwork. The students nod. It sounds a little like the Mountain School.

John Morace, a contemporary art collector and former New York businessman, became a Mountain School instructor in 2005, soon after it opened, when Steve Hansen, who also teaches at the school, invited him to discuss a mannerist painting, Poppaea Sabina, that he had in his collection. Back then, Morace recalls, “people would get the nights wrong, and the doors of the bar would be locked. Or we’d hang out until four in the morning.” Today, he says, the school is more organized, but “the spirit’s the same.”

Another teacher is Richard Jackson, a world-renowned artist who came to Los Angeles 40 years ago and was a contemporary of Ed Kienholz and Bruce Nauman. Often referred to as a neodadaist, Jackson has taught art at UCLA, where Wesley was among his students, but his class at the Mountain School is more pragmatic than the standard survey course. It focuses primarily on the difficulties faced by working L.A. artists who are past midcareer and who often toil without institutional recognition or reward.

“The school’s a little bit about that,” says Jackson, referring to the sacrifices artists make. “If you’re not going to get anything for it, why the hell are you paying so much for it?” he asks, referring to MFA programs. As for why he donates his time to the Mountain School, he says, “I guess that because my experience of school wasn’t very good, I want to change it to make it better, and I have a different take on how people learn.”

So what do students glean from their experience? Connections to L.A.’s artistic network and a chance to make friends, find collaborators, and gain allies. “Mountain School is the basis of my L.A. community,” says artist and alumnus Emily Mast. Another student, who wants to be identified only as Daniel (the pupils here seem to value their privacy), explains his choice to attend this way: “For some people, it’s kind of like school, and other people treat it like a residency.” He heard about the program through friends and was already living in L.A. when he applied. “For the people who come from out of state, it’s a reason to be in Los Angeles for a while,” he says. “It’s loosely academic. It’s nice to have a reason to do some reading and thinking. I got a lot out of it.”

Back at Mountain Bar on another evening, artist Channing Hansen is giving an introductory lecture on the history of science, declaring Isaac Newton “an occult nut job who sniffed way too much mercury.” He goes on to cite lesser-known female scientists he admires (Ada Lovelace, émilie du Châtelet). When class lets out onto Gin Ling Way, everyone is smoking cigarettes and making plans to get dinner. Golia advises students from out of town not to drink and drive, to call if they need something, and to keep an eye out for a list he will soon be sending of all the openings and events happening that weekend. If they have any problems, they should ask him for help, he adds. “But seriously, don’t ask for too much,” he says, half joking. “We don’t have that much to offer.”

Illustration by Viktor Koen

Allegro con Brio

By Laurie Pike — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

“Jesus meets Bonanza,” says Jim Svejda, describing the CD he’s sliding into his car stereo. A xylophone zings. The sound of galloping horses fills the BMW 328i. Svejda speeds up. A clarinet launches into “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” He takes both hands off the steering wheel and wiggles them in the air to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s campy 1962 recording. Svejda’s jaw drops into a smile. “Isn’t it nuts?” he says.

Listen to a Svejda podcast

He ejects the disc and slips in something more serious. The third movement from Piano Quartet no. 1 by Bohuslav Martinu, the late Bohemian composer, has the qualities Svejda loves most in classical. “Abstract, distinct, nobody knows what the hell it is,” he says. “It’s utterly haunting.” But this new version, by a Czech quartet, trickles from the speakers. Svejda’s face clouds behind his amber prescription sunglasses. “Bad sign already,” he says. “It’s thin.” A piano sounds a few chords. “You’re joking!” he says, raising his voice. Before the strings have a chance to kick in, Svejda cries, “Oh, Jesus, this is unendurable.” He jabs at the stereo. “Can you say ‘mannered and précieuse’ ?” He chucks the CD over his shoulder into the backseat. “Well, they were commies until not long ago,” he says, “so you can’t blame them.”

Jim Svejda has expressed his strange love of “serious music”—his term that includes film scores, classical music, and jazz—weeknights on KUSC-FM (91.5) for half his 63 years. Since 1978, he has helped turn the former student station at the University of Southern California into the nation’s premier public classical outlet. He added a weekend broadcast in 1983. KUSC’s weekly audience of 814,200 puts it among the top five public stations in the United States. Its stature, along with Svejda’s iconoclastic style, has made him one of the preeminent announcers in classical radio. Along with L.A.’s shiny concert hall, sexy young conductor, and lucrative film studio work that attracts famous composers and conductors, Svejda has transformed the city into what he considers to be the global center for orchestral music. “He is classical music personified,” says Brenda Barnes, president of KUSC. More than that, he is eccentric enough—a ball of contradictions—to attract new listeners to a genre many worry is in decline.

*****

DJs on classical stations are called “announcers” rather than “personalities,” maybe because so few have any. Svejda, however, is so flavorful that he has earned “love to hate him” fans who chafe at his hamminess or his taste. An announcer’s job, Svejda says, is to provide a little bit of context and then “get out of the way.” In reality he calls attention to himself with wacky banter. He informs listeners that a composer was a syphilitic or a Nazi. Often he underscores the eroticism of a movement. Last October he played a romantic symphony by Sergei Rachmaninoff. “Sergei…it’s just too much! Take me away!” he swooned in an accent that, despite efforts, still sounds Midwestern. Low, resonant, straining here and pausing there, his voice has become clearer thanks to sessions with the vocal coach who works with all of KUSC’s talent. “I get this uncontrollable urge to light up right now. Great music has two great themes: God and sex. This is not about God.” Describing another piece as “brazen,” he said, “I mean that in a good way. Does brazen have a downside? There’s that expression ‘brazen hussy,’ which I have always thought of as…you don’t need to know.”

If he’s not saucy, he’s silly. Soliciting donations during last fall’s pledge drive, he took bids on the rubber chicken attached to his key chain. “Herbert for $200?” he cried indignantly. “Are you nuts?”

Barnes filled in for Svejda while he was on vacation last year and immediately received five e-mails from listeners who said versions of “Thank goodness it’s you and not him.” But, she adds, “there they were at 6:59 waiting for him to come on the air. They listen to every word he says so they can quote him when they complain. Only Jim has this group.”

If there’s a stereotypical look for a classical music lover, Svejda has it: the understated clothing—he’s always in head-to-toe black—the salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, dark gray hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. But on the air he is as gushy as a boy in love for the first time. “Jim has a young following because he is able to make classical music cool,” says Michael Medved, the conservative talk-radio host who is a close friend. “His message is that music is fun. He is a great believer in what animated Beethoven and Brahms, which is the idea that ordinary people can thrill to this music.”

*****

Svejda’s name reveals his ancestry. Pronounced SHVAY-da, it means “the Swede” in Czech. The location of his hometown gave him an antagonistic streak. New Buffalo, Michigan, sits across the lake from Chicago. “Every summer,” he jokes, “men would come over from the city and steal our women.” He hated the Cubs. His father, who weighed trucks for the highway department, was a classical music aficionado who took his son to concerts. “I was a jumpy kid,” Svejda says. “This was one of the only things I would sit still for.” At 11, he took up the oboe, which he practiced for eight hours a day. He possessed the aural equivalent of a photographic memory, which has sharpened over time. Needing no more than a few hours’ sleep at night gave Svejda the opportunity to pursue other passions. He collected nearly every baseball card in the 1957 Topps series. He cannot count the films he has seen more than 100 times.

In the late 1960s, Svejda attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He holds degrees in philosophy, history, literature, and—almost—African studies. He took part in draft protests to meet girls. “That was the reason most males of the period did political stuff,” he says. “The prevailing myth was that the women were similarly liberal in their sexuality. Which proved to be an utter myth. At least for me.” In all-or-nothing fashion, he gave up the oboe. He would never be truly great, he decided, so there was no point in playing.

“I don’t have a voice for radio,” Svejda says. Yet he chose a career in broadcasting and landed a paid job at WONO in Syracuse, New York. There his unorthodox style was born. The station’s 26-year-old owner, Henry Fogel, rejected stuffiness for a more personal and passionate approach. He and Svejda thought it would become the norm for classical stations. (It didn’t, of course, but Fogel’s other innovation, the radio pledge drive, did.) Svejda moved on to the larger WCRB in Boston, then to San Francisco to make radio documentaries about composers. He missed being live on the air, so when KUSC called in 1978, he came to Los Angeles. It took him only a week to get over his preconceived notions of L.A.’s superficiality and embrace its “crazy experimentation.” He dated so many women of different ethnicities that his mother suggested white ones must have seemed exotic. He even learned passable Chinese.

On his weeknight show he frequently interviewed conductors, composers, musicians, writers, and directors. He also condensed selected recordings from the show for The Record Shelf, a weekly one-hour program. Syndicated nationally, it heightened both KUSC’s profile and his own.

As he grew in importance and boosted the station’s ratings, Svejda’s life took a series of unexpected turns. A self-described “standard-issue ’60s radical,” he swung politically to the right, even though he continued to work in public radio, which most conservatives would like to defund. Now a registered Republican and a fan of Rush Limbaugh, he says life experience extinguished liberal guilt he had felt about the disenfranchised. “I think everybody should get exactly what they think they deserve,” he says, “and just shut up about it.”

Svejda transformed spiritually, too. His parents were raised in Christian households, but in the 1990s he attended orthodox Jewish services. “I’ve always been an orthodox agnostic,” he says, which means, “I don’t know, and I wish I did. But Judaism is so civilized and so logical and so totally admirable.”

*****

At 42, Jim Svejda marked a decade at KUSC and entertained no notions of leaving. Los Angeles would be his home. He was writing a new edition of The Insider’s Guide to Classical Recordings, his 900-page book. KUSC was close to passing a half million listeners per week. And then Svejda had a heart attack. His skin was blue when he arrived at the hospital. He recalls being vaguely aware of people trying to save him. “I saw the lights and hovered from above,” he says. “I had a sense of sitting on a big stone wall and having this irresistible urge to lean over and jump off to get to the other side. There was also a sense of absolute euphoria.” After bypass surgery, he quit smoking and drinking, but he did not cut back on work.

The next year, 1989, after he had helped build the nation’s number one public classical station, KUSC switched format. Intended to reflect the diversity of the city and attract young listeners, “the New Sound” was a mix of classical, rock, pop, jazz, and hip-hop. One announcer resigned a week into the experiment. Svejda stayed, though he refused to play the Beastie Boys, or even the Beach Boys, alongside Beethoven. (He equates rock music with finger painting.) He stuck to his “serious” music and was not invited to participate in fund-raising. “I went in every day expecting to be fired,” he says. Listeners—and funding—declined for seven years. Bottoming out, KUSC hired Brenda Barnes to return the station to an all-classical format and entice back its audience. “We had Jim Svejda,” she says, “which was critical.”

With Svejda at the nucleus of a hopeful staff, the fans returned, and the station’s annual budget climbed from $2 million to $6.5 million. Approaching retirement age, he produces more hours of programming than any of the station’s 29 other full-time employees. He edits out every “um” uttered in recorded interviews and takes vacations only when his boss forces him to. “He’s never satisfied,” Barnes says. “Nothing is ever good enough.”

Although Svejda is one of the world’s authorities on classical music, the fact that he cannot master it is what drives him. “It is so big that you will never understand it all,” he says. “Listening to it makes people smarter. It’s been proven. But, like aspirin, no one knows why it works.”

Photograph by Dustin Snipes

Tout Sweet

By Margot Dougherty — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Lisa Romerein

A pair of Hasty Torres’s Christian Louboutins recently starred on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in an episode named for them. The size 6 shoes were unwearable, not because of a formidable heel but because the pastel pink creations were made of three pounds of white Belgian chocolate. This isn’t the first time that Torres, or her chocolate, has headlined a reality-TV show. The Girls Next Door girls—identically blond and bouncy Holly, Bridget, and Kendra—asked her to help commemorate Hugh Hefner’s 82nd birthday with edible renditions of their best features. “You can imagine the body parts I molded,” says Torres, a diminutive 35-year-old with a perfect manicure and an immaculate white chef’s coat. “They came in and I went, ‘You want what?!’- ” Torres lets go with a whoop of a laugh, one that starts low, explodes on release, and hyphenates her conversation at regular intervals. No wonder the girls felt comfortable hopping on her worktables and having her make molds of their intimate areas.

Partial to white chocolate in the morning, milk chocolate around midday, and dark chocolate come evening, Torres is an exuberant testament to the mood-enhancing benefits of cocoa, sugar, and butterfat. Madame Chocolat, her three-year-old Beverly Hills shop on Canon Drive, attests to the triumvirate’s versatility. A golden Louis XVI-style chandelier hangs in the center of the store, overlooking tables and shelves crammed with chocolate-dipped Cheerios, peanut butter cookies, Oreos, Rice Krispies Treats, and deconstructed s’mores made of marshmallows smothered in dark chocolate, dusted with graham crumbs, and skewered on lollipop sticks. The chocolate Santas, shalom bars, and dreidels will be replaced by hearts and lips in February and Easter bunnies and eggs, fat pigs and frogs, in spring. More Louboutins—some with a faux snakeskin sheen—will come out in force for Mother’s Day, and Dads will get their due in June: milk chocolate watches, dark chocolate cigars, white chocolate golf balls. On a round table by the door, Torres showcases her giant chocolate chip cookies (more chocolate than dough) and what may be the best croissants in Los Angeles.

Those croissants, snugly twisted, classically sized, so rich with high-grade butter they make you want to laugh out loud, reflect the intersection of Torres’s work and her personal life. Her husband of three years is Provence-born Jacques Torres, one of the world’s premier pastry chefs (formerly at Le Cirque) and now among its most famous chocolatiers. With partner Ken Goto, Jacques has five chocolate shops (and an ice cream store) in New York, including a new one in Rockefeller Center. He has an outlet at Harrah’s in Atlantic City. Jacques, who is 51, met Hasty in 2004 when he hired her at his original Brooklyn shop.

*****

While working for a Century City-based finance company in her mid-twenties, Hasty (pronounced HASS-tee), who wanted to own her own business, became mesmerized by “this magical guy named Jacques Torres” on the Food Network. “He was always creating these amazing masterpieces,” she says, “like the New York skyline with taxis and the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty—all made out of chocolate! Unnnnbelievable!” She had a long-standing affinity for the confection. “I was the freak at school who always had chocolate in my backpack,” she says. “I munched on it in the middle of the night, had it under the pillow. Halloween was my favorite holiday. My brother and I would go trick-or-treating, run back home, switch costumes, and go back out again.” She loved Snickers, M&M’s, and those little Hershey’s bars.

“I did some research on Jacques,” she says. “Who is he, how does he know all this, is he an artist? Turned out he was a pastry chef, a chocolatier—what’s that? Eventually I thought, ‘There’s a way to make money and eat at the same time!’ ”

Hasty enrolled in an 18-month course at Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena. When she received her diploma, her pastry instructor, who’d worked with Jacques at Le Cirque, passed along Hasty’s résumé. “The teacher was very insisting,” says Jacques, whose Gallic accent is still strong. He agreed to a one-week trial, and Hasty set off for New York. “I was so shaking,” she says. “Growing up in L.A., we’re not usually starstruck, but Jacques was the icon. He was my inspiration.” She made an impression of her own. “It’s hard work,” says Jacques, whose smile is easy and strikingly boyish for the head of a $10 million enterprise. “You’re on your feet for many hours, carrying heavy things. We all do everything, including myself. Not everyone can sustain the pressure. Not everyone has the drive it takes. Hasty does. We put pressure on her, and she respond well.”

Hasty worked with Jacques for two years in New York and opened and managed his SoHo store. From the beginning she had planned to return to L.A. to start her own place. After she announced that it was time to go home, he asked her to dinner. “I went into the bathroom and locked the door,” she says. “The other employees were banging on it, asking, ‘Are you all right?’ I stared in the mirror, saying, ‘Is this a joke? Are you going to be the laughingstock for years to come? What if he kisses you?’ ” That last thought hanging, she joined Jacques for dinner. “It was so romantic and we had so much to talk about,” she says. “Eventually he leaned over and gave me a kiss and that was it. Talk about sparks. Unnnnbelievable!”

*****

Los Angeles is not lacking for chocolate shops. Within blocks of Madame Chocolat, K Chocolatier offers an assortment based on a Hungarian style of chocolate making, and Teuscher specializes in Swiss imports. At Jin Patisserie in Venice, Kristy Choo incorporates Asian flavors in her creations. Hasty’s chocolates combine French tradition and American nostalgia. Because her operation is too small for a cacao-bean roasting facility, she makes her pieces from imported Belgian chocolate. “I personally prefer its taste,” she says. “For me, the Swiss is very sweet and the French tends to go bitter. Belgian goes right in between—it’s so harmonious in your mouth.”

Regardless of its provenance, she says, “chocolate is so sensual. It’s all about passion and love. Jacques says it best: ‘We fell in love over chocolate, we make chocolate, and at the same time chocolate is what keeps us apart.’ ” The couple married—twice—in 2007, following up a traditional Persian ceremony (Hasty’s family is Iranian) at the Hotel Bel-Air with a more informal (no ties allowed) wedding on the island of Bendor near Jacques’ hometown in the south of France. Jacques lives in Manhattan, and the bicoastal marriage means meeting up when schedules permit, either at their homes in New York, Los Angeles, or Paris or at food events like the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. “People are always asking what the difference is between my bonbons and Jacques’,” says Hasty, who describes her chocolates as more feminine than her husband’s. “This winter we’re making gift sets with both—and they can decide for themselves.” Hasty and Jacques are also considering an L.A. pop-up shop for the holidays.

“It’s interesting, our dynamic,” she says. “When we put our chef coats on, it’s chef and sous-chef. I’m his right hand, and we work very well together. As soon as we take our chef coats off, it’s wifey and husband.”

We’re sitting at one of the two small tables in the front of Madame Chocolat. Hasty’s parents, who moved to L.A. from Iran in 1979, come and go from their offices in the back. Mrs. Khoei (aka La Maman) offers us chocolates while Mr. Khoei, as reserved as his wife is effusive, delivers a latte, sliding a dark chocolate heart on a stirring stick next to the cup. When Hasty’s younger brother, Johnny, drops in, he slips on a pair of cotton gloves and offers bonbons on a silver tray to visitors. The Khoeis are people pleasers.

Behind the register is Torres’s laboratory, where tempering units swirl basins of dark (60 percent cocoa), milk (43 percent), and white (no cocoa at all) chocolates and keep them at 34, 32, and 30 degrees Celsius, respectively. Customers can watch as Torres decorates her elegant bonbons, each filled with a flavored ganache, the sweet paste that starts with chocolate and cream. The Citron, a white chocolate oval hand painted with a delicate green stem and minute lavender flowers, surrounds a lime-spritzed white chocolate ganache. The Monsieur’s dark chocolate exterior enrobes a ganache infused with Johnnie Walker Blue.

The family-run shop is more humble than Jacques Torres’s emporiums, two of which include factories where customers can watch cocoa beans being roasted and their bitter nibs transformed into premium chocolate. “At one point in New York,” Hasty remembers, “I was the decorator of the bonbons. During the holiday season, we were hitting 8,000 pieces—a day.” Jacques describes himself as a taskmaster (“I have no mercy”). Ever the jokester, he got big yuks by putting raw eggs in Hasty’s clogs. “He thinks that’s hilarious,” she says. “The whole kitchen would laugh for days.”

On a recent Saturday at Madame Chocolat, Jacques stood behind a stainless steel worktable as Hasty, wearing a floaty lemon-and-orange handkerchief dress with significant décolletage and sky-high heels, twirled around the front of the shop, making a video for Madame-Chocolat.com. She wrapped her lips around a caramel-filled chocolate heart for a provocative close-up. “Dance with her!” demanded the director, and Jacques, shyly at first, took his wife in his arms and led her in a waltz of sorts. He segued to a tango and soon dipped Hasty dramatically. “Kiss her!” shouted the director. As if he had to be told.