Nicotine fiend nurses on smoke break aside, unless you’re stumbling to the Kaiser Medical Center emergency room, no one has any business along Barnsdall Avenue in Hollywood. Running along the ass end of the Hollyhock House of Frank Loyd Wright

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Not a year since we investigated goings on at Hollywood’s Green Jello house for a radio segment, everything spiraled into hell for the collective of art rocker-freaks. We hear life is upbeat for survivors, relocated in that catch basin of American woe, Vegas. And while we’re cranking on the true tale of woe we’re calling the fall of the house of Jello, the images Legman captured stand on their own. Above, Techno Destructo don’t play.

The fears of the Occupy movement have come to pass, namely that the language, symbols and the efforts of so many brave, resourceful and determined people have been co-opted in full. What’s worse, a glitzy event in Los Angeles over the weekend made this unfortunate choice for a giant wall graphic (above) displayed at the ACE Museum. The designer is stone-cold ignorant of the colors of the Nazi war flag, utilized for public enlightenment by Goebbels in the most notorious propaganda posters ever created. Not just the colors hand picked by Hitler, but the distortion of the numeral ‘9’ instantly reads as the symbol of Hitler’s executioners, the SS . Certainly this can feed into right wing hating and will only undermine everyone’s struggle.

Per Wikipedia:

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Wrapping up this Veterans Day with Mr. Fish of truthdig.com who had a brilliant solo show of his clever, nuanced and obsessively crafted drawings at Santa Monica art compound Bergamot Station’s Berman Gallery

Word is the cartoonist will be a guest on NBC’s Last Call with Carson Daly, 

 Art inspired by the Great Recession has yet to make a cultural impact, so this impresses: One of Alex Scheafer’s burning Chase Bank paintings fronts this months Artillery, the West Coast art mag that-unlike NYC-based Artforum and Art in America- is actually readable. We regularly run into Scheafer as he pounds tall boys and paints during Downtown LA Artwalk in his corner of the Hive Gallery. Swell guy if not all that ambitious a painter; we’re glad to see he’s swirling the cadmium flames and three months since   making the LA Times front page, still running with  his fifteen earned after cops rolled up on his en- plein-air-painting ass outside a Chase bank in Van Nuys. Searched his home too, which hasn’t happened to a single banker.

Artists Talent Test  Mixed painted media on panel 13.5” x 20.5” 

 The Marvel universe inspired paintings of Mark Todd drew a happening crowd to the show’s opening last Friday at La Luz de Jesus, including an intrigued Ashoton Kutcher, taking a rest break from battling the LA Weekly and owner Village Voice Media.

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 ”How much, like 25 bucks? Sweet! I’m getting this” an overly excited Chris Namon,  babbled to us, inexplicably waving an idol of some kind at our head. “This is TIGHT! Its Bonnie..Bonaparte, and he’s awesome and I’m getting it.” Seems after emptying his ubiquitous flask and pounding the last of the cocktails poured in the piazza of the J. Paul Getty Museum, LegmanLA’s music editor-at-large, who tagged along as a carbon emission cutting third wheel on a recent date (on the free parking day) got all consumerist, spotting a nicely crafted figurine of Napoleon in the Getty’s gift shop.

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ACE Gallery was a spectacular white box whose monolithic walls and rays-from-heaven- like lighting lent import to any damn thing on the wall when it was in SoHo back in the day. And while the adjacent deli that sells tallboys remains on 6th Avenue, ACE has long moved to LA  where it became grander; occupying theme-park-scaled gallery space at two locations. We hit their Wilshire Avenue space the other night for the opening of opera designer Achim Freyer’s painting show


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Yosi Sergant’s coyly named Manifest Equality show, his first spectacle since getting run out on a rail from DC, came and went this past week. And while he’s still not forthcoming with the scoop on his brief tenure( “I don’t kiss and tell” Yosi told the Legman) the former National Endowment for the Arts spokesman gave LA an idea of the potential lost to the White House, producing an ambitious charity show of art inspired by a message of gay rights and filling the massive (you can fly a helicopter around in there) former Big Lots space in Hollywood with the graphic art that flourishes here. Predictable pieces by Swoon and Shep Fairey were overshadowed by some strong work; we liked  Patrick Martinez’ painterly portraits of ice cream-eating gang-bangers and Scot Lefavor’s insightful image of ranger-buddy National Guard troopers. Nothing here on par with the sensual social realism of New York painter Paul Cadmus, but the swell crowd Yosi and colleague Jennifer Gross drew made the opening a blast.