Sam Bloch

Chris Paul, Clippers Quarterback

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:20:00 -0400

Commissioned for LA Weekly’s annual People Issue but unprinted due to issues in production. (Last year I wrote about Li Fellers.) Chris Paul is a professional basketball player. He runs the floor and loves talking about how he does it, and he’s candid and insightful without being gossipy. Like a company man he demurs politely when asked about business. I’d be surprised if he leaves LA — he likes hosting family at his big house and his son’s Montessori school.

We met after a home game evisceration of the Bucks and later talked on folding chairs at the team’s practice facility with his press dude hovering close by. I was struck by level of access and intimacy granted to NBA beat reporters but also by this complicit understanding that they stick to this boring and digestible script. After the game reporters queued up by the locker room and were ushered in to show different Clippers just-uploaded videos of their own slam dunks and ask to rank them. In the press room next door they asked players to reflect on a one-line stat sheet — Cambria, size 12, plain white office paper — handed to everyone in the room. (Look out for this time next time you watch a post-game press conference and guys answer questions by looking down at the table and reciting stats.) No wonder most athletes sound like idiots.

Unfortunately for sports fans these are really terrific, funny environments — professional athletes unwinding or getting ready to perform for 15 thousand fans. I’d like to see more reporters talking about the on-the-rise second-stringer who stuffs his face with chocolate mints before the game, or the veteran who drapes enormous heat pads on his thighs and plays with an unreleased smartphone, or even try the packaged, cafeteria-style meals handed out before the team charter. (Chicken cacciatore.) I think Chris Paul gets that.

Spotlights have a way of erasing your surroundings. The intensity blinds you, turns whatever’s not right in front of you to black. When Chris Paul was named the Most Valuable Player of this year’s NBA All-Star Game, he accepted the award with his four-year-old son at his side.

“I’m not who I am without my family,” says Paul, 27. Lots of professional athletes say things like that. Paul, the starting point guard and undisputed leader of an invigorated Los Angeles Clippers franchise, means it.

Seated on a folding chair at the team’s practice court in Playa Vista, the sounds of skidding sneakers and thumping basketballs filling the room, Paul explains his game day routine to a reporter. Normally, this is when he’d pick up his son, nicknamed Lil’ Chris, from school in Santa Monica, on his way home to Bel Air for lunch. But this is an off day. So the architect of Lob City — the swaggering team nickname coined upon Paul’s arrival in L.A. during last season’s lockout — and his son are playing putt-putt.

At a shade over six feet, Paul isn’t physically intimidating. His father taught him to play basketball more like a quarterback calling plays in football. He controls the floor — directing movement through shouts and gesticulations, dishing passes through unexpected holes, and of course, setting up outrageous, emphatic slam dunks that are more like touchdowns than two-point buckets. Before home games, while his teammates ham up for fans during the starting lineup, he scopes the referees and susses out his opponents for signs of low energy.

“I’ve always tried to play as unselfishly as possible,” says Paul. “My big thing is, make sure everybody gets the ball.”

When Paul was traded from New Orleans, his original destination was the Lakers, where he’d be the set-up guy for a superstar who plays as selfishly as possible. The trade was infamously scuttled for “basketball reasons” and Paul agreed to join a team who’d been underdogs for decades. Recognizing a potential franchise player, the front office solicited his input to build a team that could be a contender.

He was excited to come to L.A., but the move was rough.

“For two months, I was living in a hotel in the Marina,” he recalls. “I did Christmas in that hotel, and my wife was so depressed. We had a tree, like a little tree, and we had just found out she was pregnant with our daughter.”

Since he joined the league eight years ago, Paul and his wife have always lived in condos. In L.A., he bought his first house. He admits it’s a little “weird” living in Bel-Air, but when his friends and family visit from North Carolina, they stay at his place and shoot hoops on the neighborhood court. His agent just took him to his first Oscar party. And he eats healthier here. “You can’t just walk into a restaurant back home and order something gluten-free,” he says.

And when he takes Lil’ Chris to birthday parties, are the other parents Clipper fans?

“They are now.” —Sam Bloch

Jackie Treehorn's House and Its Eccentric Owner

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:23:00 -0400

Jackie Treehorn's House and Its Eccentric Owner:

Written for LA Weekly’s recent Big Lebowski anniversary special. A few weeks earlier I toured this house for an ALAC party and wrote about a part of the house that isn’t used in movies — Jim Goldstein’s own Turrell skyspace.

For Treehorn’s encounter with the Dude, the crew set up for a three-night shoot. Goldstein “wasn’t thrilled” about a big black sheet being thrown over a glass, which would obscure a view of the Century City skyline. “I am proud of the way the house looks now,” Goldstein says. “I don’t like it when a set designer makes changes just to justify his pay.” There are exceptions: For a Snoop Dogg video, the crew filmed in Goldstein’s bedroom and replaced a row of his velour and snakeskin cowboy hats with a row of sneakers. “I completely understood the need to Snoopify the house,” he notes.

Art Los Angeles Contemporary Journal

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 13:10:00 -0500

Over the weekend with partner in crime Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal I developed original editorial content for Art Los Angeles Contemporary, often described as “the contemporary art fair of the west coast.” Turnaround-style coverage of events, performances, screenings and parties, written and posted within hours on the fair’s website. We also took a lot of pictures and popped a lotta tweets. This is the fair’s fourth year. Some of my posts I’m most proud of:

Jon Pylypchuk Readies His Installation. This, the second time ALAC hosted an installation at its entrance. Like a sculpture of a hot dog oozing mustard all over itself outside a food stand, or a tooth brushing its own teeth to advertise a local dentist, we gawk and wonder — I know you’re trying to tell me something, but is it about you, or me?

Keyed to the Sunset. An after-party at the home of Jim Goldstein and a tour of his private James Turrell skyscape. I obliquely allude to the muzak being piped into the skyscape, a forty-five minute drum loop that’s more appropriate in a plastic surgeon’s office or on a Virgin America flight before take-off, and regrettably exclude description of the bed built into the floor.

The World is My Idea. Scott Benzel demonstrates the power of will by physically communing with the objects on his stage. He flings belt sanders down stage-spanning wood chutes, their movements for a moment paralleling his outstretched arms, and bumps the bass on a reel-to-reel tape player.

Night Becomes Day Becomes Night. How an architect is helping a small, downmarket gallery retain its spirit of surprise in the move to a cavernous warehouse. There’s plans to build freestanding structures inside this building, like a chapel made of felt and a triangular-shaped chill zone, that abut each other and in whose interstitial space will be opportunities for what I euphemistically call “serendipitous encounters.”

Go to Tracy’s website for her favorites — I loved her Guide to Getting Lost at Barnsdall Park, intelligent and to the point description of MOCAtv, and open house of collector Marc J. Lee.

weretoomuch: Sad girl contemplating the sacrifices made by the...

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 00:44:04 -0500

weretoomuch:

Sad girl contemplating the sacrifices made by the sociopaths who live in the enormous mansions that punctuate the otherwise barren desert landscape of San Bernardino County during a slack moment in an equally desolate government office next to the 405 freeway

Mayan Apocalypse Parties

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 20:00:00 -0500

Mayan Apocalypse Parties:

Major regret was not finding a hyped-up promoter to recount all the gory details of his out-of-control Y2K rave. From last week’s LA Weekly.

To his chagrin, Lazarus is just one of a handful of promoters throwing a big party that night. There are easily a half-dozen other American productions crowding the Yucatán’s ruins, beaches and resorts, not to mention a few other shows at popular pyramid sites outside Mexico City and in continental Africa, including an epic Skrillex gig and a career-minting celebration thrown by L.A.’s the Do Lab.

That this new era is kicking off on a Friday is a cosmic synchronicity that’s damn near impossible for producers to resist.

The Do Lab Built a Massive SoCal EDM Community. Next Stop: Egypt

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 19:57:00 -0500

The Do Lab Built a Massive SoCal EDM Community. Next Stop: Egypt:

Unfortunately I make it all sound rather prosaic and calculable but how cool is it that these former ravers are so good at doing what they love (partying) that they can afford to fly all their friends to play a show at the Great Pyramid. Regrettably I was unable to include an anecdote about one of their major whoa moments — realizing the value of investing in shelves for their warehouse. Ran a couple weeks ago in the LA Weekly music issue.

“I still remember the first time we got paid $500 to set up some lights,” Jesse recalls. “I couldn’t believe it. Just to hang some fabric up there.”

elmhurst on Flickr.

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 14:04:42 -0400

elmhurst on Flickr.

On Dirty Projectors

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 21:30:00 -0400

3. Quick article in LA Weekly about forthcoming Dirty Projectors full-length music video called Hi Custodian. Filmed in Southern California while the rest of the music industry was at or oriented to Coachella. Parts look sorta like Go Forth shot with a Steadicam, others like 2001 dropped in a trailer park.

The environmental diversity of Southern California suited Longstreth’s long-simmering concern that in contemporary America, unprotected natural space of any kind could be sucked into the “national grid of uniformly commercialized zones.” In Hi Custodian, that includes the creeks of the Angelus National Forest, the sandy beaches of Point Mugu, a ranch in Sunland and the desert in Anza-Borrego, and most pointedly, the residential sprawl in the Antelope Valley. In one scene, Longstreth, playing a peripatetic troubadour not unlike a young Woody Guthrie, strums his guitar on the empty streets of Lancaster, an arid desert landscape long rolled over by exurban tract housing.

2. October 2006. Flyer I designed for a party I booked with Dirty Projectors and High Places in my living room in Poughkeepsie. This was right before DPs started touring Rise Above material. I urge you to find a copy of the acoustic session recorded at WVKR the next day.

1. A few months earlier. Capsule review of New Attitude for Stylus Magazine.

Instead of the majestic wail at the end of The Getty Address—femme, meditated, scythed, multitracked—Dave Longstreth picks up the pace and opens this record with a single caterwaul, a clarity further expanded by (surprise!) a fluid backing band. Admittedly, Longstreth stills meddles with the collage shit that makes Scott Herren want to call it quits, but it’s compounded with singer-songwriter zen. So we’ve got drums with momentum and a near-corporeal guitar twang that’s way more than a motif on tracks like “I Will Truck.” The audience approves—claps and yells right back—when Longstreth yells “precious reciprocity!” on live track “Two Young Sheeps,” his eight-minute take on Graceland. All of which is funny, of course, because even though dirty projectors show us obscured images, this batch is pretty clear.

ps1 on Flickr.

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:39:00 -0400

ps1 on Flickr.

tandem bar on Flickr.

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:38:41 -0400

tandem bar on Flickr.

big apple, 3 am on Flickr.

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:37:56 -0400

big apple, 3 am on Flickr.

You can't fight a war without acronyms

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:07:00 -0400

Title credit to Don D. Earlier this week the Los Angeles Unified School District fired thousands of its youngest teachers and staff, the oldest of whom may have been 35 years old. This sounds like a terrible idea but the district actually does this every year, such is the tendency of American public education systems towards self immolation, per its agreement with the teachers union to preserve the jobs of the oldest teachers in times of great financial duress.

I write you, dear blogosphere, as the son of a union-side labor lawyer, a profound skeptic of the Protestant ethic, as a critical consumer frankly repulsed by the hand-drawn advertising aesthetic concocted by multinationals to disguise their otherwise unsavory desire to strip the dignity and security from what was once a solid career in manufacturing, but I don’t know if I can get behind the unions in our schools.

There’s two big problems here. One is the habitual organizational dysfunction wrought in the school bureaucracies by the union contract. People ask me why things don’t get done in the public sector, and I think it’s the same reason why it takes so long to get an answer when you call Home Depot or Verizon, that when the people who are there to help you think they’re gonna lose their job in a year anyway, the incentive is not really there to serve your client. Moreover institutional knowledge is never codified. Imagine getting in deep for a few years and then you’re unceremoniously yanked before you ever tell anyone else where to find the tax identification number or business tax certificate and now accepting donations is a real mystery!

The other is that I think old people are basically worthless in the young man’s game of education, and unfortunately those are just the people who the district is compelled to hang on to and consolidate. Creative, energetic, optimistic and patient talent — these are the kinds of teachers who struggle to get hired in LA Unified and now turn to charters and private schools for gainful employment. I understand that an older teacher might have diminished career prospects if they’re forced to leave the district, but is it really in the interests of, ahem, the future citizens of tomorrow if their teachers are so not on their level?

All year I’ve been working with a cool perky twentysomething Spanish teacher to get our school’s edible produce garden off the ground. We raised money, got school staff on board, shot the breeze with parents, visited other school gardens to gain some insight into getting families and volunteers involved in the day to day of the gardens, and to one day feel like they could run it themselves. (This is called sustainability, and it’s what I’m charged with building as the VISTA Leader in LAUSD’s Community Partnership Branch.)

That teacher was fired last Friday. She’d been with the school for four years. To say nothing of all the students that she’s no longer gonna support, all the kids who maybe hated their home life but loved being in class with a mature twentysomething and could really relate to her because she was more like an older sibling rather than a stern old disciplinarian, there’s this beautiful new garden that might be dead in the water.

Now gardening is fun for all ages, and there’s no reason this teacher’s replacement, who will, per the terms of the union contract, be older, perhaps even much older, won’t enjoy working working in the sun with her new students, but what of the next step — getting the parents involved? Dare I say spending extra hours pounding the pavement, convincing families that gardening is useful for them too? This is the totally extracurricular work that a young, optimistic teacher will gladly do, not the ex-pensioner who has no interest in learning Spanish. The only reason the older, more senior teacher has a job is the contract. And they’re sticking to it.

Judy Chicago's Upcoming Disappearing Environments: How Do You Make Art Out of Gigantic Pyramids of Dry Ice?

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 03:26:00 -0400

Judy Chicago's Upcoming Disappearing Environments: How Do You Make Art Out of Gigantic Pyramids of Dry Ice?:

With her reinterpretation [of Disappearing Environments] for Pacific Standard Time, Chicago has found herself in the unenviable position of recreating legitimately hazardous works in the age of permits and lawsuits.

On Saturday, Chicago and Woodman hosted a crash course for the volunteers, explaining to them the difficulties and happy accidents that result from working with dry ice. Scrolling through a highlight reel of images from 1968, Chicago, clad in a pink hoodie and distressed blue jeans, stops at a picture of a toddler running around those ziggurats. A concerned team member interrupts.

“Shouldn’t we be worried about children being near our designs?” The team murmurs in agreement. Huffing dry ice vapor is deadly and touching the block can burn your skin like a hot stove. Later, a scruffy young man talks about the necessity of building a ziggurat that collapses inward, so as to protect both team members and audience members.

“Look, I know this is part of the Getty,” Chicago says. “But when we did this, there was no issue. It just didn’t collapse.”

Another old one at LA Weekly. Their archives are nutty. Regarding this preview piece: if you’re doing something cool and sneaky, act first and apologize later, don’t partner with a major civic event and try to fly unencumbered.

Bad Past Gone Away: Tour NewVillager's New Album in Chinatown Tonight

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 18:18:00 -0400

Bad Past Gone Away: Tour NewVillager's New Album in Chinatown Tonight :

Like the ephemeral pop-up structures of Thomas Hirschhorn, the different rooms are bound together through common, often discarded materials: crinkled blue tarps, plywood, electrical tape. But in the NewVillager myth, they assume extraphysical properties. As we walk past a papier-mache shrine to the Black Crow Boy, Simonini points to three polyethylene strips stretching to the center stage. These, he explains, represent the three breaths taken during a transformation. But they’re also a neat visual parallel to a cord running to an overhead projection room, where Luke Fischbeck’s low-power station radio KCHUNG (1700 AM) is transforming the sounds of the installation into radio waves. (“There’s a seven-second delay,” says Fischbeck, “so we can take out any profanity.”)

Never mind my failure to convey Luke’s sarcasm with that last line, this is an older article that I’m proud of, reposted here almost a year after publication for posterity. It was just a mess in there, a genuine testament to the day-to-day operations of the Human Resources space, which is an enormous white cube that exists to be scaffolded over by lighting, textures and peoples, rather unlike the reverence coerced out of visitors by the expensively preserved austerity of most up-market galleries. Meanwhile Luke and coconspirator Solomon were simultaneously broadcasting the low-level activity on their pirate radio station and playing it back inside the space on a chintzy battery-powered box, thus transforming the sound of the gallery into a freaky feedback loop — like what’s you’re hearing is supposed to be public but in fact it’s only ever gonna be heard by you, in here, right now. Dare I call this performance a kind of induced claustrophobia. There was no overhead lighting. Given the preponderance of yellow gel clamp lights I’d go with womblike.

Anyway, here I am, pretty blown away by the scale of this metastasizing yurt, trying to figure out what the guiding principles are and what the participants add to this space, and I musta managed to come off like some kind of an antagonist when I interviewed Luke and Solomon. I thought my line of questioning was acute, even illuminating in its directness (“so if the transmission only goes 60 meters, and no one outside of the space can hear what’s happening here, then why are you here?”) but Luke’s answer, something about their mere presence adding to the dynamism of the installation or at least exemplifying the space’s capacity for interaction with creative guests, wasn’t delivered but rather stumbled out, like my forthrightness was poorly masked derision.

It’s these interactions that bum me out on arts journalism — that even when I’m feeling it, or curious, or just trying to process some crazy shit in front of me, I tend to rub interviewees the wrong way. That I treat the most eccentric and most oblique artists as some kind of Ferris Buellers who’re doing something basically out of bounds and getting away with it, and I’m the narc here to bust them, when what they want is someone on their level about scientists experimenting in the lab. I want to appeal to their sense of the subversive or transgressive but unfortunately the rapport is usually stronger with artists when I prostrate myself — play the empty head, the sycophant, the unreserved enthusiast. Artists, of course, take their practice seriously, so like a left fielder who can’t hit when the game’s got his noggin in a chokehold, they probably resent those who suggest their work is fun, or puerile, or worse yet an avenue for shirking the responsibilities accrued by people with more boring lives. And that’s a shame, because I wouldn’t call NewVillager’s Temporary Culture ballistic nonsense, but if I did, it wouldn’t diminish my appreciation for dense, ambitious work.

Li Fellers: The Lady Is a Sleuth

Fri, 25 May 2012 22:09:00 -0400

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.

Art is: a pile of hyperinflated sub-Saharan currency...

Fri, 04 May 2012 16:57:00 -0400

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

Cybelle in a creek on the Snyder Estate, a network of emptied...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:42:00 -0400

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

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

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:07:00 -0400

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.

I’m knee-deep in DeLillo’s Underworld and as usual...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:20:00 -0500

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)

Photo

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:19:54 -0500