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.

“That won’t work, it will not get you far in Los Angeles. THAT is not an LA car” the art dealer prophesied, pointing at the Legman’s Ford Taurus outside a Williamsburg gallery when we announced our bailing the Big Bagel. His words were driven home each day since. From dirty stare downs at reds from blond air heads to comments from valets (this at the Beverly Hills Hotel “Are you, like, STAYING here?”) nowhere in this car nut town did we see the respect our NYP tagged HuMPT (highly mobile multi purpose Taurus) drew parked on Bronx sidewalks, sans hub caps 5-O style, across 2000 crime scenes. Over 10 years of duty, shotgun and bottle of Beam beneath our seat, the Bull which traversed the nation twice, hit all five boroughs in a single day chasing stories for a major metropolitan newspaper, braved subzero trips to Montreal, and on 9/11 barrelled down the West Side in a state trooper convoy to ground zero at 90mph, has been impounded by LAPD sanctioned tow pirates.

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We’re catching up on the blur that was the past two weeks, and cut off from the company supply cabinet as we are, that means sorting the loose scraps and cocktail napkins accounting for our meandering across LA’s cityscape. Top of the pile here is a Miller coaster with notes from last night’s opening of LA punk photos circa 1978 at La Luz de Jesus Gallery which was nothing but brilliant boozy illuminating fun. That’s because of our chat with Ruby Ray, the co-founder of San Francisco based Re/Search Mag who captured an iconic image of William Burroughs back in the day. “I had to get a lawyer to file a cease and desist. I’m living in poverty and they’re using my work” Ray told the Legman, rankled about her pic of the Naked Lunch author wielding an automatic-Walther Polizeipistole Kriminellmodell?- being ubiquitously splattered on t-shirts.

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The man who was Hipster-In-chief

Artists, idealists, genuine cultural producers just don’t mesh with the worker bee world of cover your ass/ do as little as possible without getting caught/risk management; immersed in all that square shit they are simply out of their element. Case in point: Yosi Sergant, the LA publicist who coordinated a youth-centric arts front for the Obama election campaign, attached the word “Hope” to a poster, then rewarded with a White House appointment to the National Endowment for the Arts famously fell as canon fodder to Glen Beck et al. Sergant is back in LA and for the first time since his conference call fired up right wing haters he’s spoken out in a comprehensive overview of his ascension-and getting thrown under the bus-today on
USC blog Neon Tommy.

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