Danish-Icelandic artist Jacob Boeskov belongs to the ever-expanding, mostly boys’ club of autobiographical artists for whom irony, social commentary, and sexuality are interchangeable tools in a mad scramble to get ahead in art. The centerpiece of this sort-of retrospective is “My Doomsday Weapon” (2002/2004), a performance piece in which Boeskov attended China Police 2002, a weapons and police equipment trade fair held in Beijing.
Two months have elapsed since a 15-year old Westside resident named Luis Angel Linares was stabbed to death on State Street during a sprawling after-school brawl between rival gangs. Much of the soul-searching, chest-thumping, and finger-pointing attending Linares’s death have likewise subsided, but they’ve hardly disappeared.
The tallest building in the world loomed on the Taipei skyline, its 101 stories rising ghostly in the morning mist. I leaped out of the taxi and soon was in the world’s fastest elevator, zipping from the fifth floor to the glassed-in 89th floor observatory in 37 seconds. Other than a moment of ear-popping, I was hardly aware I was smoothly traveling aloft at 37.5 miles an hour.
Early on in Stephen Sachs’s masterful adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, John, played by Chuma Gault, tells a cunningly childlike riddle. “What’s got four eyes and can’t see? Mississippi.” The play, which is set on July 4, 1964, makes the point of this riddle abundantly clear in 90 rapid and tumultuous minutes. The State of Mississippi has blinded itself not only to the social change sweeping the nation, but also to the tortured conflicts that lie at its own heart.
Despite the religious convictions of the United States’ founders, the separation of church and state is one of the most fundamental-and unique-concepts on which the nation is based. Given the resurgence of American religious fervor of late, the relevance of debating religion’s place in the political landscape is clear.
As amazing as the human eye is, its perception is confined to an incredibly thin band of electromagnetic energy we call the visible spectrum. Beyond this optical window there exists an entire range of energy interacting with matter. An exhibition of photographic images currently on display at Brooks Institute’s Cota Street Gallery takes us beyond the range of visible light, exposing a world the naked eye can’t see.
Money, beds, case managers, a bigger jail-they would all help fill the gap in services for those suffering the simultaneous effects of mental illness and substance abuse problems, or dual diagnosis. But as of now-and without creative thinking in the future-those won’t be a reality, according to a panel of 23 law enforcement officers, experts, and public officials gathered at the Faulkner Gallery on Tuesday, along with a standing-room crowd of about 140 community members.
During a lunch with her gal pals Starshine gets an earful about vaginal reconstruction.
HE WHO SMELT IT, DEALT IT: Let me admit that I wouldn’t know a Delta Smelt if one bit me on the ass. And neither, I’m guessing, would most of you. But that doesn’t mean I want to be a party to their annihilation from planet Earth. What, after all, did a smelt ever do to me?
God, I don’t know,” laughed Victoria Williams while talking about how a Louisiana tunesmith who made her bones in the Los Angeles club scene came to live in the deep desert. In a hippie cafe on the wide road that leads from Joshua Tree National Park to the big, twirly wind generators outside Palm Springs, Williams is not exactly holding court. She has too much natural humility for that.
