That Evening Sun

Suitcase Joe, Skid Row Photographer. Check out his column, "That Evening Sun," at Riot Material Magazine.

10.24

March 18, 2019 By Suitcase Joe Leave a Comment

That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

For most people in Los Angeles, the rain is a blessing. For those who are homeless, it only makes a hard life that much tougher. [Read more…]

10.23

March 16, 2019 By Suitcase Joe Leave a Comment

That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

When I showed her the photo afterwards she said she didn’t realize she was holding up her hand. She asked me for change, and I didn’t have any, but I offered to buy her breakfast instead. She said, that’s alright and gave me a dime. [Read more…]

10.12

March 15, 2019 By Suitcase Joe Leave a Comment

That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

Jerry lived through a shotgun blast point-blank to his face. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen him around, but he was extremely positive about life and his situation. [Read more…]

4.13.19

March 13, 2019 By Suitcase Joe Leave a Comment

That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

“You can take pictures of him, but don’t pet him. He’s not here to be friendly.” The owner of this pit bull told me the dog listens well, but warned me not to get too close to him, either. This dog, like many of the dogs that live in Skid Row, has been trained to be a guard dog and to protect his owner. [Read more…]

Adventures In Abstract Sound: The Music Of Eric Dolphy

Musical Prophet: The Expanded New York Studio Sessions (1963) on Resonance Records Reviewed Henry Cherry The music collected on Eric Dolphy’s Musical Prophet: The Expanded New York Studio Sessions (1963) is so unyielding and so open, it’s hard to accept the musician would be dead in just under a year. After rejoining former band leader […]

Suzanne Jackson: holding on to a sound

at O-Town House, Los Angeles (through March 23) Reviewed by Genie Davis There are so many different elements that make Suzanne Jackson’s exhibition, holding on to a sound, aptly named. Regardless of the medium, her work has a kind of musical component to it, a lyricism that seems to radiate from the wall where they […]

Theatricum Botanicum Sees Plants As Dynamic Agents Of History

Reviewed by Robin Scher “I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now — in order to support the moral contradictions of and the spiritual aridity of life — expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only […]

Birds of Passage Is A Haunting And Outstanding Gangster Drama

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko In 2015, Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra won the world’s attention with his Oscar-nominated Embrace The Serpent, a bold black-and-white drama that followed an Amazonian tribesman as he leads white scientists into the wild in search of a curative plant. Culture clash also plays at the heart of his much-anticipated follow-up, Birds […]

Xiu Xiu’s Girl With Basket of Fruit

Reviewed by John Payne This all by way of passing comment on the challenging Xiu Xiu, never an easy thing to do. A couple of years ago I talked to the band’s main male Jamie Stewart. He was forthcoming and amenable, not a difficult artiste, and he talked about what he does with a seriousness […]

Jeff Koons At The Ashmolean

Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford UK (through 9 Jun 2019) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones To say that a work of art holds up a mirror to the world is to recognise an attempt by the artist at portraying the truth. “See what the world really looks like” is the message. Art like this – […]

Alone Within the Revolution: Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment

by Alci Rengifo The writer wanders the seaside of a great island lost in his own thoughts, lovesick and grappling with a changing world. Such is the enduring image of Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s masterpiece Memories of Underdevelopment, which remains the greatest jewel of Cuban cinema. First released in that fevered year of 1968 to worldwide […]

La Raza And The Onetime Voice Of Chicano Activism

at the Autry Museum, Los Angeles (through February 10) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner You know something is happening but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones? –Bob Dylan, “Ballad Of A Thin Man” Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. –George Santayana The sixties was a tumultuous […]

Hunting in the Dark

by Kika Dorsey Joan was convinced she had cancer. Sometimes it was a dull ache in her side, sometimes a cut that didn’t heal. She knew of a woman with Crohn’s Disease and just recently an old friend of hers died of pancreatic cancer. It was just a matter of time before those alien cells took […]

Serpentine Fire: Radical Artists and Innovative Mediums

at Quotidian, Los Angeles Reviewed by Genie Davis With Serpentine Fire, now at Quotidian, curator and gallerist Jill Moniz has assembled an astoundingly innovative, resonant show from artists who have pushed the limits of their materials and subjects. The title of the show is taken from an Earth, Wind, & Fire song, and just as the […]

Asghar Farhadi Misfires With Abduction-Thriller Everybody Knows

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Everybody knows. It’s not just a title. It’s a promise. It’s a threat. It’s a bombshell. In a cozy, sun-dappled village outside Madrid, everybody knows Laura (Penélope Cruz) and Paco (Javier Bardem) were childhood sweethearts. Everybody knows their break-up was brutal and strange, with her leaving for Argentina while leaving Paco […]

James Siena: Painting

at Pace Gallery, NYC (through February 9) Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban James Siena has had what might be called a linear career. Whether painted, drawn or sculpted, his work is purely line-based. Yet his art always avoids the shortest distance between two points; i.e. the simple straight line. Instead he has continued to evolve work […]

Velvet Buzzsaw Offers Artfully Dark Fun, But Makes A Mess Of Its Horror

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko With Nightcrawler, writer/director Dan Gilroy teamed with Jake Gyllenhaal for a deliciously vicious evisceration of news media’s “if it bleeds it leads” culture with a format that was one-part thriller to one-part dark comedy. The result was a film that was wickedly entertaining and thought provoking, while proving Gyllenhaal is one […]

Joan Semmel: A Necessary Elaboration

at Alexander Gray Associates, NYC (through February 16) Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban Joan Semmel is the master of the anti-Selfie. For decades she has turned the camera on herself, using candid photographs as references for her large-scale nudes, which are both sumptuous and unsettlingly intimate. For an age obsessed with instant, miniature self-branding imagery, pervasively […]

Ed Moses: Through the Looking Glass

at William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica (through March 30) Reviewed by Genie Davis To say that the opening of Ed Moses Through the Looking Glass, was crowded with fans and art lovers is an understatement. Moses is an LA icon of art, and the collection of his recent works on display here underscore the reasons […]

The Bewitching Mind-Fuck Of The Natashas

Reviewed by John Biscello The Natashas, by Yelena Moskovich, Dzanc Books. 232 pp. $16.95. You enter a dark, deserted warehouse on the waterfront. One that smells of cats and kerosene, and whose walls are covered with dusty calendars from bygone eras. Or perhaps you find yourself in the balmy catacombs of an arterial sanctuary. Or, fill-in-the-blank, and […]

Paige Jiyoung Moon’s Days of Our Lives

at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell Paige Jiyoung Moon’s solo exhibit, Days of Our Lives, at Steve Turner, Los Angeles, is utterly immersive and compelling. Through minute details both in size (with most paintings averaging just 12 inches in size) and in presenting the everyday, Moon highlights the mundane aspects of life, […]

Walk to Vegas Has Legs, And Is A Sure-Footed Comedy To Boot

Reviewed by Erin Currier In the character-driven lineage of such classics as Goodfellas, Big Lebowski, and True Romance; Walk to Vegas (written by Vincent Van Patten and Steve Alper; directed by Eric Balfour) features a brotherhood that operates on an informal black-market economy impervious to the rules of law, other than the innate sense of […]

Tito And The Birds Is A Visually Stunning Tale For Our Times

Reviewed By Kristy Puchko Fear can act as a sickness, making us quake and quiver before falling petrified and useless. Fear can spread like a virus, contaminating whole communities, pitting people against each other and the wider world. In the Brazilian animated film, Tito and the Birds, this simile is made literal as an eye-catching […]