Image credit: Walt Mancini for the Pasadena Star-News
I admit: I am more than a little interested in the game of soccer. I’ve had to leave baseball behind to make sufficient time for the Premier League games I want to watch, but I’m not just a fan: I also play (a lot): 7v7s at Immaculate Heart in Los Feliz on Tuesdays; classes in Frogtown on Wednesdays; scrimmages in Highland Park on Thursdays; pick-up games in South Pasadena on Sunday mornings, and parents’ league games in Glendale on Sundays. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but just imagine how much more soccer stuff I could be doing if I didn’t also have to go to work and raise two children!
Anyway, this is relevant because soccer is about to descend on Los Angeles with the force of a thousand tsunamis (as scored by the Champions League theme song). The World Cup is coming, and although there are plenty of reasons to be morally repulsed by that fact, there are also plenty of reasons to be excited. I was 13 the last time the US hosted a World Cup, and it was an extremely underwhelming experience (aptly concluding with a scoreless draw and penalties to find a winner), in part because America as a whole was only just waking up to the fact that a foreign-born sport could be entertaining. But America gets it now, and I can’t wait to see what Los Angeles feels like as the capital of the world’s game (or one of the capitals, anyway).
But what’s this mean for people who are not already consuming 4-6 hours of podcast content in order to track American players’ performances across the US and Europe? Well, I think it means that you should strongly consider getting together with some other people and watching some soccer this month! (And we already have some suggestions about where you might do this, as it happens.) The tournament kicks off June 11th, and the schedule is packed with group stage games through the 27th, when the knockout round begins. That means multiple games every day, and since the games are in our hemisphere, you don’t even have to get up in the dead of night to watch them! I am mentally preparing myself for some horrific US performances and an early exit, but maybe that won’t happen. And if that doesn’t happen, I will lose my soccer-loving mind (and you can too!). I mean, just look at these reactions from when the American team squeaked through the first round back in 2010 – and that was when the World Cup was in South Africa! If something similar were to happen this year, here, Lincoln, Nebraska would probably self-detonate, to say nothing of Los Angeles.
So yeah, get out there a bit, is all I’m saying. You might find something to celebrate.
- Daniel Harmon
Cultural Events
Clockwise from L to R: Coriolanus; FIFA World Cup image Courtesy of SPF/Shutterstock; Photo by Lori Stessel, courtesy of L.A. Dance Project; The Art Parade poster image; Lit Lit photo by Melina Psarros; Avocado food sculpture by Daniele Barresi
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June 2-7 & 17-21 - LA Dance Project’s City of Dance(Various) Sometimes, when nobody is looking, I do what I call a “dance hike” in Elysian Park. With my tunes turned up, I dance while I hike. It’s no parkour, but it’s still a fun challenge to find movement that propels me forward, while keeping the beat (and quickly toning it down when I see someone coming). It’s a little risky, and very liberating. My point is: I love dance in unexpected places and so this free suite of performances presented by L.A. Dance Project, which take place in public spaces throughout the city, are right up my alley/hiking trail. (MR)
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June 6 - Food-Inspired Sculpture Workshop (MacArthur Park) It’s free! It’s inter-generational! And you can just drop in! All important things for a young family on an early summer afternoon. This workshop was inspired by the LACMA exhibition From MacArthur Park, with Love, and will help participants of all ages create 3D food sculptures with air-dry clay. (DH)
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June 5 & 6 - Belle & Sebastian: 30th Anniversary Tour (Hollywood) I’ll never forget dancing with a French DJ in an underground “cave à vins” in Paris to the soundtrack of ‘Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying.’ When I asked the DJ who sang the song he said, in the Frenchiest French: “Belle et Seb-ah-stee-ahn”. My heart went pitter-patter and I’ve been hooked on the stuff ever since. The music, I mean! I’m out of town for their 30th anniversary show but please go and tell me about it! The first night is for Tigermilk and the second night they’ll be doing If You’re Feeling Sinister. Get me away from here, I’m dying already! (MR)
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June 6 - USA vs. Germany at Silver Lake United (Silver Lake) If you’re still not sure about the whole soccer thing, why not test the waters with a not-quite-legit soccer match at a highly legit soccer joint? The stakes are low to vanishing, in that this is a friendly match, but this is an easy way to get to know some of the national team players in their last game before the tournament begins. (DH)
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June 6-7 Lit Lit (The Little Literary Fair) (DTLA) Did anyone else feel extremely overwhelmed at Printed Matter’s excellent, yet massive LA Art Book Fair a couple weeks back? More and more, I’m seeking out intimate environments for art-viewing and cultural adventure. Taking place on SCI-Arc’s campus, Lit Lit is organized by the Los Angeles Review of Books and will showcase over 50 independent presses and literary organizations, all from the West Coast. Okay that’s still a lot, but, AI be damned! Some of us still like to READ BOOKS. And touch them, too! (MR)
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June 11 - Five Easy Pieces (Vidiots) I wish I could recommend The Dekalog, which is playing at the Los Feliz Theatre in installments this month, but it’s already sold out! (If it weren’t, I’d note that seeing a ten-hour meditation on ethics in 1980s Poland might be a good way of combating the plague of social media temptations that beset us now every day.) In lieu of that deep moral accounting, may I present instead the existential wandering that is Five Easy Pieces. I love this movie, less for Jack Nicholson’s weird ferocity (which I understand a lot of people are into) than for the realism of the settings and the people. Plus bowling! It’s an uncomfortable delight! (DH)
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June 20 - The Art Parade (Mid-Wilshire) I’m psyched for this co-production between Jeffrey Deitch and LACMA, inspired by an event Deitch conceived of in New York in the early 2000s in which he transformed the streets into “a living gallery.” As a continued celebration of the new David Geffen Galleries (which I found SPECTACULAR and also raised A LOT of questions for me—slip into my DMs if you want to chat!), the two behemoths have invited public citizens to present projects for “mobile, processional works designed for an outdoor, public setting.” The chosen works will be featured in a parade down Museum Row. The free event will stroll right past the new metro station and join up with a Block Party on the museum’s campus. A great day for LA! (MR)
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June 20 -Back to the Future (Griffith Park) Outdoor movie season is back, baby! And although there are lots of incredible options for brave and mature adults this month (Taylor Sheridan’s Hell or High Water; Michael Mann’s Heat; and (as it were) Christian Bale’s American Psycho(!?)), there are also some great options for families. Chief among them, In My Humble O, is Back to the Future — truly a film for all ages and times. (DH)
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June 24 through EOM - Coriolanus (Griffith Park) I absolutely love The Independent Shakespeare Company, and one of the things I love most is the fact that they feel no need to play the hits. They did Love’s Labour’s Lost last year, and it was an absolute revelation as a comedic forebearer of the heavier themes in King Lear and Hamlet. This year they’re doing Coriolanus and Comedy of Errors, and although I’ve never seen either (and had no real plans to) I expect to come out of both similarly enlightened. Shakespeare: good writer! And this is truly a great all-ages event, as long as the ages in your particular party are all above, say, 8. (DH)
God bless the 70s, man. What with the gaudy colors and the grainy film and the willingness to chronicle rather than flatter, it transformed an objectively questionable period in American life and culture into something extraordinary. And this is relevant, because Los Angeles also really benefits from that kind of treatment. This is not a beautiful city, and no amount of angel wings painted on technicolor walls can change that reality. But it is, definitively, a real city, with issues and authenticity (plus some rather ridiculous tendencies) in abundance. It’s a great place for the movies, as a result, and although the 70s tended to commit more heavily to New York (not a terrible choice), it’s an absolute thrill to see Los Angeles onscreen from this time period as well.
I’d been intending to write about Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice* here for a while, because of the way that movie manages to put its otherwise heavy-handed LA satire in the background by focusing more squarely on the broader cultural changes that the four main characters embody, but the sexual politics there remain a bit, uh, awkward. But I was thinking about it, and I think that maybe the most exciting representation of Los Angeles in that period comes from a graphic novel, and not a movie at all.
Sammy Harkham’s Blood of the Virgin was a bit of a phenomenon when it came out (14 years in the making!), but of course a phenomenon in the graphic novel universe is usually only a ripple in the wider cultural pond (I saidusually!). A friend recommended it to me, and since then I’ve given my copy to two other people in turn. There’s a lot going on in this book (art vs family, art vs reality, art vs art…), but for our purposes here, all I want to note is that it’s got all the shabby-seediness that you’d want from a book about exploitation 70s filmmaking, plus some disastrous party-scenes that give that Boogie Nights sense of heightened reality. (“That crazy nightmare must’ve been what it was actually like!”) And yeah, through it all, the city lurks in the background: flat, oppressive, watchful. It’s a landscape that invites ambiguity and the book full earns it. Compromise costs us a lot, but so does art.
- Daniel Harmon
* Fun fact: Robert Thierren used the font from the movie’s famous poster as inspiration for a piece that was recently featured at the Broad’s This Is a Story exhibit – which just goes to show that art follows a winding path and you never know where your sex farce will wind up.
