Silverlake Blvd.

Edward St Aubyn's Dunbar

 

A nasty excellent surprise. It’s a gimmick for Hogarth Press – new fictions based on Shakespeare - but the result stands on its own merit.

 

St Aubyn tackling King Lear is almost too obvious. Our foremost anatomist of wealth and aristocratic connections that produce nothing but even more greed, envy, pissed away lives, and estrangement from humanity.

 

But on the other hand, in the Patrick Melrose novels, St Aubyn maintained an anti-Shakespearean clarity and concision. Most of the novels follow the classical unities of time and place. Likewise, he even tends to keep conventionally “dramatic” bits of the story between chapters (or between volumes). More Phèdre than King Lear. Hence the pleasure of following St Aubyn as he adapts the material.

 

He’s clearly in his element with the horrible daughters. Here’s a glimpse inside Abby’s mind:

 

She had hunted by helicopter before—gazelle in Arabia, wild bull in New Zealand, hog in Texas—it was something that ostentatious people kept thrusting on her as a special kind of treat, but to be honest it was absolutely deadly being trapped in one of those swaying, shuddering machines, wearing headphones and a pair of goggles while spewing hundreds of empty shells a minute into the pristine countryside below. It made one feel like such a litterbug. The animals were rather pathetic as well, trying to escape the cacophony of flying metal by setting off on what might seem to them a virtuoso gallop, but from an aerial vantage point just looked like a bad choice made in slow motion.

 

A “step backwards” if you will, to the world of his Patrick Melrose novels. But are we really done with the 1%? Have the super-rich subsided into harmless docility since the last PM novel came out in 2011?

Pacific Standard Time: Latin America/Los Angeles

 

This last edition of Pacific Standard Time was for me an introduction – not a reinterpretation or re-contextualization. I was proud of myself for recognizing the names of three artists (out of 100+) featured in “Radical Women”. My awareness of post-pre-Columbian Peru was limited to Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” and ”The Things I Say are True“ by Blanca Varela, so it was good to walk into a room and get blasted by Victoria Santa Cruz’s “Me Gritaron Negra”.

 

That kind of discovery kept happening, at show after show. I had never heard of Raúl Lozza or Eduardo Abaroa,(his “Total Destruction of the Anthropology Museum”) or the composers Diana Syrse and Felipe Waller, or the photographer Gustavo di Mario, or the sculptor Nadín Ospina. I don’t know how I lived before seeing two gloriously witty and naughty shorts: Gloria Camiruaga’s “Popsicles” and José Ángel Toirac’s “Opus”

 

It helped that the exhibitions were cleverly curated and well-installed. “Found in Translation” and “Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney” were, of the shows I saw, the only ones that really engaged with the overarching theme of Latin American connections with Los Angeles.

 

The Getty’s spectacular “Golden Kingdoms” justified including art before Columbus. Their other offerings contrasted nicely: the jazzy jewel-like abstractions of “Making art concrete” and the sprawling cultural and historical documentation of “Photography in Argentina”.

 

“Condemned to be Modern” took an unconventional topic – artist’s reactions to modernist architecture, usually imposed by totalitarian regimes – and created a festival of black humor.

 

Two of the best shows approached LA/LA theme obliquely:

 

The Huntington’s “Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin” was at first glance daunting: lots of glass cases with old books propped open inside them. But if you took the time to look and let your eyes adjust! A set of books from 1554 & 1645 with armadillo illustrations! Another vitrine with 16^th century books about tobacco. The show-stopper was a set of tempera-on-paper paintings for the Matis expedition 1783-1816, by Jose Maria Carbonell, et al. Each specimen is presented in a way that not only makes its form clear, but also creates a superb decoration. Plus there were first-class curiosities like “His Majesty’s Giant Anteater”, without doubt the most likeable picture to come out of the studio of Anton Mengs (or was it really painted by ... Goya!?)

 

I confess to uncritically loving everything in “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.” This betrays a bit of nostalgia – I remembered some of this  stuff from the 1980s. But it's also completely relevant as a reminder of How Not to be Oppressed, and How Not to be Depressed. Use razzing and ridicule to make up your own culture, for the fun of it. Not commercial, not academic, not esoteric. Political in the sense of aware of cultural and economic conflicts, but free of moralizing outrage. No party allegiance to defend. In short, a utopia of love, laughter and irreverence. A dream curtailed for too many by AIDS: Mundo Meza, Carlos Almaraz, Ray Navarro, Bruce Rapp, Teddy Sandoval, Jack Vargas, ….

 

[Image: Free buttons! Available at some of the PST LA/LA exhibitions]