Deborah Picker

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The Coffee Table

Deborah Picker
Okay. Twelve books. Two pages. And four days to go until Christmas. Take this down: Each of the 50 grainy, hand-tinted color plates in Robert ParkeHarrison‘s stunning collection of mixed-media photographs, The Architect’s Brother (Twin Palms, 136 pages, $60), incorporates elements of performance, sculptureinvention and painting, and is said to......
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The Coffee Table

Deborah Picker
Okay. Twelve books. Two pages. And four days to go until Christmas. Take this down: Each of the 50 grainy, hand-tinted color plates in Robert ParkeHarrison‘s stunning collection of mixed-media photographs, The Architect’s Brother (Twin Palms, 136 pages, $60), incorporates elements of performance, sculptureinvention and painting, and is said to......
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Back to the Depression

Deborah Picker
She’s pretty, Heidi Julavits, in a collegiate sort of way, fresh and blond and bright. But her fiction is decidedly bleak. In her debut novel, The Mineral Palace, Julavits leads us back to Depression-era Pueblo, Colorado, a gritty little mining town teeming with big secrets. Bena Jonssen, newly relocated to......
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Art, California

Deborah Picker
This Sunday, October 22, LACMA opens its doors to its ”mid-century indoor-outdoor and lifestyle room with patio overhang.“ No, the museum hasn‘t ventured into real estate. The ’50s display is one of three ”period rooms“ filled with era-specific furniture and decorative arts, and is just the tip of the largest......
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Home School

Deborah Picker
ARCHITECTURE L.A. AT THE HAMMER UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. October 8 through December 14   In conjunction with two major architecture exhibitions opening this month at the UCLA Hammer Museum (“The Un-Private House,” on loan from MoMA in New York, and the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban......
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Flex in the City

Deborah Picker
Thomas Beller plays a little trick on me. The young Manhattan-based fiction writer -- whom The New York Times has called ”brilliant“ and the New York Observer ”a local rake“ -- is late to our lunch at the Hollywood Hills Coffee Shop, where I’ve been waiting, for the better part......

A Vine Afternoon

Deborah Picker
Drinking chilled white wine is like sipping summer. Despite my inability to wax properly on the color, clarity, bouquet or finish of a good glass of wine, still, a slow and indulgent afternoon of winetasting -- especially on a hot day -- remains one of my most decadent pleasures. And......

Naked Brunch

Deborah Picker
Photo by Geoffrey Grahn It was a budgetary compromise — it’s not like I get off on running around naked in public. We were in search of a romantic desert hideaway, my husband and I, to celebrate our first anniversary. Given that we typically travel in a beat-up Honda (with......
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X-Rated eBay

Deborah Picker
I made $14 selling my used panties on eBay. See, I got curious about the ”panty people,“ as I‘ve dubbed them, who pawn off their worn undergarments in the adult section of the online auction house. (It was a few Weekly editors, incidentally, who first put me on to the......
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Spiritual Calling

Deborah Picker
A 10-minute video tribute of actor Elaine Welton Hill‘s work was shown at her recent memorial service (Hill died Nov. 15), culminating in an edited sequence of her curtain calls. Onscreen, Hill lowers her head repeatedly, each time draped in a different costume but always with her characteristic expressive eyes......