
Chutzpah trumps all.
Bobbi Rubinstein |
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This is the first solo museum exhibition of artist Timothy Washington, a notable contemporary of Los Angeles’ canon of African-American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, including David Hammons, Betye Saar, and John Outterbridge. A Chouinard Art School graduate, Washington’s body of work includes a powerful series of mixed media drypoints, monumental sculptures, and folk art assemblages. With a firm foundation in figurative art, Washington’s work covers a trajectory of calculated realism to assembled abstraction, which parallels the social history of L.A. from Washington’s own perspective. ~ CAFAM See press release. Exhibit runs through 4/27/14. Craft and Folk Art Museum ![]() We’ve done this before. New Year’s Eve without the Ball Drop. Instead we celebrate St Sylvestre's Day, a pope who died on the last day of the year in 335. L’Eglise Saint-Sulplice has an organ concert at 8:30pm to ring him in. We book tickets online and hop the Metro, waiting in the rain to get in, first come, first seated. The church is magnificent. The organ has many pipes. I look around at the audience and wonder if they can tell we’re Americans I am always on my best behavior when I travel. No Ugly American in white tennies. Look – I’m cultured, not a Philistine. I clap with enthusiasm to show how much I enjoy classical music, even though I hate organs, especially Bach and those morbid fugues. I nod and laugh along with the audience as the musician introduces each piece. But his French is way too quick for me. Afterwards we go to a Vietnamese restaurant and run into a young woman whose hometown is 30 minutes north of ours. Back to the apartment, climbing up a spiral of four French flights, to ring in the New Year. We stand at the open kitchen window listening to the countdown screamed in French from the party upstairs – dix, neuf, huit, sept ... Later the revilers sing American rock & roll at full throttle – Dion & The Belmonts, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons with a Gallic twist. They make the whole building shake with their dancing. At 4am they drag beaucoup de garbage bags of empty wine bottles down the stairs to the recycling bin. I fall back to sleep enjoying ringing in 2013 with my neighbors. The noise bothers my family but makes me feel part of the apartment building. The next year it is Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin in Times Square once again, except for the accented English of Sherry and Runaround Sue that still plays in my head. |
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January 2023
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