sk business

• 2012-05-25

  Li Fellers: The Lady Is a Sleuth

  “However I can, I make my interviews informal and unthreatening,” she says. “I’m honest about who I am, and I ask them to help me understand what might have happened.”

  She chews, thoughtfully.

  “You’d think private investigation is a lot of chasing people with guns. But you know what? People are really nice to me.”

  True! Or as Don Draper would say, people listen to anyone in command because they love being told what to do. I wrote about Li Fellers, private investigator, for LA Weekly’s annual People issue, and in retrospect, I should have expanded on the central narrative premise, that we met not at a desk or an office or a holding cell but a gorgeous old steakhouse hidden in plain sight. It’s Li’s job to find people hiding out in the weirdest or let’s face it poorest parts of town so she’s got this encyclopedic knowledge of the best dives, trucks and jazz clubs, particularly near where she lives in South LA. Her version of Los Angeles is a good one, one that rewards perseverance and years on side streets.

• 2012-05-04

  

  Art is: a pile of hyperinflated sub-Saharan currency (“something worthless”) on the fifth floor of the New Museum. 

• 2012-04-25

  

  Cybelle in a creek on the Snyder Estate, a network of emptied cement mines, in Rosendale, New York.

• 2012-04-19

  

  Arts education in LAUSD

• 2012-03-17

  Peaking Lights Got Pregnant. That's When Their Musical Dreams Came True

  Released last year on Highland Park-based experimental label Not Not Fun, their second album, 936, was a game-changer. At that time, so-called chillwavers were achieving popularity by washing facile pop melodies in baths of haze and echo. The mellow, dubbier stuff of Peaking Lights was a refreshing alternative. A year later, 936 has sold something like 3,000 copies — not exactly burning up the charts, but Not Not Fun’s most successful release by far in eight years of business.

  Spent an afternoon in the unfurnished front room of Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis, the married couple who play music as Peaking Lights, for a recent profile in the LA Weekly. Aaron is from Pismo but Indra grew up in Wisconsin, and I got such strong Midwest vibes from her. She’s equally affectionate and frank and doesn’t let much get by her. When Aaron started talking about their recent entree into the indiestry — showcases at Urban Outfitters, A&Rs guiding their career — and I suggested how lame that might be she shut me down. They’ve been playing music for twenty years, she told me. It’s gratifying to play in front of real audiences.

• 2012-02-03

  I’m knee-deep in DeLillo’s Underworld and as usual with this guy I feel like he’s writing for me. Above all I’m taken with this idea that everything we take or consume, it leaves a trace and that ends up somewhere and someone else has to deal with it. In his world, secrets are better understood as nascent vulgarities. This is a video I took on the train today and at first I thought it was just about the dude I was taping but now I know better.

  They went into a hole-in-the-wall place, a lot of cracked plaster and roachy baseboards and a stock of rare recordings. But you’re not talking about old jazz 45s. These were phone taps you could buy, or bugs in the wall, recordings… of ordinary anonymous men and women, even more repellent-addictive, your next-door neighbor maybe, and Marvin understood how such a purchase could lead to stupefied hours of listening, could take over a person’s life, all the more so for the utter sucked-dry boredom of the recordings and how they provided the lure of every addiction, which is losing yourself to time. (319)

• 2012-01-21

  

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  My brother Ben, posing at the Backstreet Museum in the Treme district, with headdresses worn by band leaders in second line parades. When I was in New Orleans, every bar, restaurant, gallery, book and record store I visited was in a house. This picture was taken in the back of a double-barrel shotgun. In the Bywater neighborhood, the supermarket is in a dewy warehouse where fish tanks were once cleaned. It shares the space with a pizzeria and Mardi Gras Zone. 

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  Atchafalaya Bayou, Louisiana

• 2012-01-15

  

  Last night, Cybelle and I went to an invite-only supper club at a chef’s loft in the arts district. (Her first visit after waiting on a mailing list for two years.) We had something like twelve dishes — I remember a ceviche dish with iced cocktail sauce, really rare duck cooked in a heated tub of water, pound cake topped with pop rocks, and a chicken liver sauce. They were brought out to us, one by one, like miniature courses, and before we tucked in, the chef hovered over the table and explained what was in front of us. It was during that time that most of the sixteen guests whipped out their smartphones and handheld cameras and captured, for digital eternity, the image of these immaculately prepared plates, then took small, thoughtful bites and munched in reverent silence.

  Anyway, I’ve been fascinated by this distance between the practice of photographing food and the lived experience of eating for some time now, and I wrote about it for the last issue of YA5, the fantastic Portland-based arts journal co-edited by the homie David Knowles of Publication Studio, which was released in September but unfortunately remains unavailable online. (The theme-free first issue, featuring the writing of fellow eudaimonist Freddy Deknatel, can be downloaded here.) In particular, I explain why we love uploading pictures of our food online, even before we know if it’s good or not:

  We do not taste the same way, but we are able to see the same way, or at least, recognize symbols the same way, and that’s most often how we relate to one another our experiences with food. Our long history of imaging our food has not meant to convey the importance of flavor or texture. These images have provided viewers with information about knowledge and desires.

  In a world obsessed with information, the photograph really does food justice. It captures the maximum amount of detail, ensuring that any viewer can find at least one thing they personally understand. It is what Sontag called “a miniature of reality that anyone can acquire,” taking food out of the highly personal realm of digestion and into the familiar world of consumer society.

  This issue was great and I’m still so proud to be a part of it. I loved Amy Bernstein’s meditation from the counter of a Red Robin, the flamboyance of molecular gastronomist Herve This and of course the editorials from co-editors Knowles and Sam Korman. In his piece, written about that part in Hook when Robin Williams summons a sumptuous feast with his imagination, Knowles more gracefully explains why food is a cipher for imagination:

  Though smells and tastes are experience both individually and communally, these sensations resist being codified into a system of representation or a code of communication. They are a primary experience resulting from direct contact with the world itself and not its representation. The production of most contemporary food work is caught up in these Proustian themes, primarily concerned with the summoning of memories and the reclamation of authentic unmediated experience.

  Read “Pics or It Didn’t Happen,” my piece on food photography, here.