Ivy Bottini: The Beauty of Seeking Justice
Ivy Bottini, the 83-year-old gay-rights activist who’s been fighting social injustice for five decades, has lately found herself in a “floral phase.” Dressed in blue jeans, sneakers and a white “I [heart] WeHo Dykes” T-shirt, she sits next to an easel in her sunlit studio jammed …
Mark Bradford: Hometown Hero
An artist commonly regarded in the contemporary-art circuit as being as smart, pleasant and talented as he is tall, Mark Bradford got a late start given the art world’s preoccupation with youth. Born in 1961, he attended CalArts, where he completed both his BFA and MFA, in his 30…
Mark Casanova: The Rescuer
Mark Casanova, parent, tells a harrowing story about one of his sons. In late 2001, 23-year-old Daniel Casanova traveled to Bangladesh, where he and two friends built a traditional sailboat, then set a course for Australia. The vessel began to sink off the coast of Burma. Help di…
America’s Cocaine King Hid From Drug Cartels for 25 Years
To protect members of Max Mermelstein’s family, his alias and certain names have been changed.
DELRAY BEACH, FLORIDA — MOVIE THEATER — NOVEMBER 2006
Former Escorts in Los Angeles actor Brett Tabor tops a medium popcorn with jalapeños, as is his custo…
On the Backs of Children
Two years ago, when Principal Tim Sullivan, who saw educating inner-city children as his life’s work, walked onto the Markham Middle School campus in Watts for the first time, it seemed like a “movie set,” where Denzel Washington, star of Training Day, might suddenly app…
DWP: Reservoir Dogs
It’s called a bucket truck, a large Department of Water and Power vehicle with a cherry-picker mechanical arm, and it’s parked all day on St. George Street in Los Feliz, under a sweet gum.
It’s a beautiful Friday, and it’s hard to figure out why the truck is there. There …
Trash Humpers: Talking Tall
Trash Humpers is not really a movie. Or so its credited writer/director, sometime indie-film enfant terrible Harmony Korine (writer of Kids, director of Gummo, julien donkey-boy and Mister Lonely), has claimed repeatedly since…
Robin Hood: Knock on Sherwood Forest
Is it an accident that Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood plays like a rousing love letter to the tea party movement? It’s certainly something of a surprise. When the movie was announced in 2007 with the title Nottingham, reports suggested that it would sympathize with t…
Movies Gone Bad
Artist/filmmaker Pat O’Neill’s 1989 Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning experimental feature Water & Power — a sort-of Chinatown-meets–Koyaanisqatsi-on-nootropics dealie — is rightfully recognized as one of the signal artifacts of …
Street Cred, 90210
Eschewing New York, renegade London street-art dealer Steve Lazarides has opened another of his audacious pop-up galleries in an unexpected derelict space — an 8,000-square-foot former Anthropologie store in the middle of Beverly Hills. Last week, Banksy’s former gallerist …