@ REDCAT - Group Exhibition : Never Very Far Apart

Never Very Far Apart
Exhibition Dates: Thursday, April 29, 2010 - Sunday, June 27, 2010
Opening reception: Wednesday, April 28, 6-8p
Artist talk: Wednesday, April 28, 6p

The group exhibition Never Very Far Apart brings together six projects that cross the poetic and political ground between the individual and the group; the local and the global; this moment in time and that place in history. Proceeding from the particular conditions in which they live and work, these artists explore distance as both border and bridge--considering how a finite position may also parallel or intersect with seemingly disparate places or distant times. Using performance, moving image, painting and printed matter, the artists examine the parameters by which context is defined and consider how they can be re-imagined to activate social spaces for renewed thought and action. Organized by REDCAT curatorial assistant Ryan Inouye, the exhibition features new and recent works by Terry Chatkupt (Los Angeles), Michelle Dizon and Camilo Ontiveros (Los Angeles), Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida (New York), Adriana Lara (Mexico City), Elana Mann (Los Angeles) and RJ Messineo (St. Louis).

The exhibition includes two collaborative projects, both of which explore possibilities of re-visioning the relationship between the present and the past. In the case of Michelle Dizon and Camilo Ontiveros' Westlake Theatre (2009), the video installation mines the layers of Los Angeles history that are held within the city's majestic 1926 cinema house. The proscenium that once presided over images of early Hollywood now arches across a swap meet that occupies the orchestra level below--bridging the various economies of production and presentation housed within the walls of one structure. Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida's 16mm film loop Populus Tremula (2010) channels the life of Ivar Kreuger (1880-1932), the industrialist, financier and founder of the Swedish Matchstick Corporation. While the camera follows the manufacturing process in two factories in operation since the 19th century, a sequence of superimposed textual interventions disrupt the seamless narratives advanced by industrialization and the nation state.
photo -Terry Chatkupt, "Field Memories" (2009) courtesy the artist.

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This Weekend - Silverlake Art* Craft & Vintage

Silverlake Art* Craft & Vintage continues the last weekend of every month from 10am-4pm in the heart of Silverlake. Located at the Micheltorena Street Elementary School.This flea market has local vendors selling their hand-made items, vintage gems, and all the of the antiques and collectibles that you are looking for at great recession proof prices. The Kogi Truck comes by most Saturdays. Live reggae from time to time.

Food Truck Block party comes to Silverlake Art* Craft & Vintage the last weekend of every month!

FOOD TRUCK SCHEDULE:

Gastrosbus

Lee's Philly Truck

Don Chow Tacos

The Greasy Weener

Uncle Lau's BBQ Truck

Del's Lemonade Truck

Barbie's Q Truck

Kabob Express

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Harvey Pekar and Alison Bechdel will be @ UCLA Live on Friday 4.23

Titans of the Graphic Novel: Harvey Pekar and Alison Bechdel

The unlikely ascent of Harvey Pekar began in the halls of Cleveland’s VA Hospital, where he worked as a file clerk for 35 years. In his spare time, Pekar wrote and self-published the autobiographical “American Splendor” comics, which illustrated his less-than-splendid life. The series gained a large and loyal cult following, and eventually was adapted into a 2003 feature film.

Joining the master of mundane is cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the author of “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” an account of her childhood and complex relationship with her father. The graphic memoir, which took Bechdel seven years to complete, was named the best book of 2006 by Time magazine. She is also author of the syndicated strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Together, these two explore the power of graphic novels as a confessional medium.

Fri, Apr 23 at 8pm @Royce Hall
$48, 36, 24*
($15 UCLA students)

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Lars Von Trier's 'The Idiots' this Thursday 4.22 @ CINEFAMILY

The Idiots is an incredibly provocative film that works on the basest and purest of emotional levels. While reactions to the film vary from extreme disgust to warm empathy, it is hard to imagine any audience member not being cataclysmically affected by watching Lars Von Trier's legendary X-rated contribution to the Dogme 95 filmmaking movement.

The story examines an radical commune of formerly bourgeoisie Danes whose primary group activity is "spazzing": going out in public and pretending to be mentally retarded. By using their "spazzing" game as an excuse to cast off the emotional constraints of living like an adult, these "idiots" demand responses from us, ranging from exhilaration, hilarity, discomfort, fear and even grief. Von Trier's directing -- in accordance with his own cult-like shot-on-video Dogme 95 manifesto -- also creates a loss of control and deep intimacy that make these themes and situations as confrontational as imaginable.

Formerly only released in the U.S. with the X-rated portions censored, The Cinefamily is proud to present the original version in all its shocking power.
Dir. Lars von Trier, 1998, digital presentation, 117 min.

Followed by

The Humiliated -
Rarely is a making-of doc so perfectly matched in tone or storyline as the subject of its gaze, but The Idiots and The Humiliated are furiously intertwined, in a mindgame kind of way that seems quite -- Von Trier-ian? Filmmaker Jesper Jargil accepted an Assistant Director post on The Idiots under the condition that he be allowed to make his own film about the film, and the result is as personal and scarring as Von Trier's masterwork.

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Go See - SHADOW BILLIONAIRE

Be on the lookout for Shadow Billionaire, a new documentary by Alexis Spraic about DHL Founder and billionaire Larry Hillblom who seemingly vanished into thin air when he failed to return from a routine flight in his vintage Seabee airplane. Before he was officially declared dead, bar girls throughout the Phillipines, Saipan and Vietnam came forward claiming to have children by Larry and seeking a piece of his vast fortune.

SHADOW BILLIONAIRE unravels the secretive life of this enigmatic and reclusive tycoon. The battle over his estate took on epic proportions, pitting impoverished teenage prostitutes against Larry’s former business associates and several of the largest law firms in the world.

A David and Goliath story, this documentary unravels a life of of mystery and exposes the underpinnings of how money, desire and greed clash when the stakes soar too high. If you liked Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Boogie Man about Lee Atwater or the BBC doc Guys and Dolls, consider this a must-see. - Steve K

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Thursday @ CINEFAMILY - Andrei Tarkovsky 'The Sacrifice'

Cinefamily Series: Making Ofs...

Andrei Tarkovsky's 'The Sacrifice'

Andrei Tarkovsky's final film is yet another of his beautifully absorbing and hypnotic portraits of madness. As aging philopsopher Alexander meets with friends at his house on the misty plains of rural Sweden, the radio announces WWIII is at hand. As an appeasement to God, Alex offers his own voice and sanity (among his other possessions) in exchange for sparing life on Earth -- and when the Bomb doesn't drop, what is he to do? Show-stopping cinematography from frequent Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist (including the most incredibly realistic "sun-lit" soundstage interiors since Stanley Kubrick's The Shining) and epic sound design here take a remarkable backseat to Tarkovsky's masterful deployment of near-imperceptible legerdemain: once life continues as "normal," every subtle re-placement of items and people in the frame throws into question, a la Solaris, the rapidly crumbling sanity of an old soul already given to questioning the world around him. Containing a stylistic summation of all his auteurly ideals, hopes and dreams up to that point, The Sacrifice is Tarkovsky's graceful swan song, painfully hinting at the remainder of a career that was not to be.

Starts@ 8pm

Shown with...
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky -
Starts @10:45

It's already a true mental strain to field-marshal a feature film, what with the attendant chaos, misfires, endless questions and minute-by-minute logistical shifts -- but can you imagine undertaking such a thing while also succumbing to cancer? That's what faced the poet laureate of Russian cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky, as he made his final work, The Sacrifice. That film's editor, Michal Leszczykowski, shot this emotional peek into the creative process of a filmmaker seldom documented on film himself. As we gaze upon Tarkovsky's unending obsession with translating his every last visionary detail onto the screen, we also hear narrated excerpts of his massively influential book on film theory, "Sculpting In Time," deeply empathize with his physical condition -- and feel the crushing heartbreak of exactly what happens when a director must scrape to shoot for a second time his one-chance-and-that's-it ten-minute single-take finale. An intense look at an even more intense film artist.

Dir. Michal Leszczylowski, 1988, 35mm, 102 min.

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BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE @ the BOOTLEG THEATER this Thursday April 15

Academy Award-winning aboriginal Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, pacifist, educator, social activist, and philanthropist (whew!) will be at the Bootleg Theater Thursday April 15th.

Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues of Native Americans. Her singing and writing repertoire includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism. Her music might generally be categorized as Folk and Traditional Music, though she did record one mostly Country Music album, I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again, in Nashville. Some of her other songs have more modern popular sounds. Her work has been covered by such musicians as Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Janis Joplin, Chet Atkins and Joe Cocker. She is also responsible for Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding of Native Americans. She has won recognition and many awards and honors for both her music and her work in education and social activism.

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TONIGHT: BANKSY's US Premiere 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' @ the Los Angeles Theater

Banksy's 'Exit Through The Gift Shop' is a guerrilla documentary which debuted at Sundance earlier this year. It's billed as "the world's first street art disaster movie" and centers on a dude named Banksy, Planet Earth's most infamous practitioner of politically charged urban art. Judging from the initial trailer we assumed Exit Through The Gift Shop would be a fly on the wall look at how Banksy conceives and executes his work but in a new five minute trailer, the incognito poster boy for the global street art movement offers a slightly different take: "The film's the story of what happened when this guy tried to make a documentary about me." he says "But he was actually a lot more interesting than I am so now the film is kind of about him." - Pedestrian TV

Monday 12th April 2010.

Doors Open at 7pm - Film starts 8pm

Film Duration 88 mins.

After show drinks in the Theatre Ballroom.

Los Angeles Theatre, 615 South Broadway, LA, 90014 213.629.2939 - cross street 6th. Passenger Drop Off outside Theatre.

Nearest Parking Pershing Square Parking Lot, 532 South Olive Street, LA, CA 90013 - cross street 5th street.

Theatre will be sign-posted from Pershing Square Parking lot.

Click here to see the walking directions from car park to theatre.

Frederick Wiseman's 'MEAT' @ RedCat this Thursday 4.8

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has created a body of work that offers a grand panorama of American life, studying human and institutional behavior in all their contradictory and unpredictable manifestations. In Meat (1976), Wiseman tracks the workings of a highly automated packing plant, illustrating important points and problems in the production, transportation, logistics, equipment design and labor management that turns cattle and sheep into consumer goods.The evening will be introduced by Josh Siegel, The Museum of Modern Art's Associate Curator in the Department of Film. Siegel has organized more then eighty exhibitions, including The Lodz Film School of Poland: 50 Years; To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation; and retrospectives devoted to artists/filmmakers including Jeanne Moreau, Nicholas Ray, Oskar Fischinger, Ken Jacobs, John Frankenheimer, Errol Morris, and the current, 2010 focus on the films of Frederick Wiseman.

JERRY STAHL will be @ SKYLIGHT BOOKS on Saturday 4.10.

L.A. writer and perennial Skylight favorite Jerry Stahl will read from and sign his novel Pain Killers, now out in paperback! Jerry Stahl is the author of Permanent Midnight; I, Fatty; Perv--a Love Story; and Plainclothes Naked. He has written extensively for film and television, and his work has appeared in Esquire, Details, Playboy, and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

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