Dwayne Booth

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Robbie Conal and the Art of Character Assassination

Dwayne Booth
View this slideshow for photographs of the installation and opening reception of "Robbie Conal: No Spitting No Kidding."     Walking into Robbie Conal’s Westside studio on a recent Thursday afternoon, I found the guerrilla poster artist and political hell-raiser wearing green surgical gloves and standing before a brightly lit......

The Lennon Year: Mr. Fish Anticipates 40

Dwayne Booth
Last month, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and watched myself outlive John Lennon. I’d been bracing for the moment ever since I was 17, six years after Lennon was murdered and right around the time I was headed off to college, seriously pissed off that my generation......

Former UN Weapons Inspector Takes the L.A. Stage

Dwayne Booth
“This is going to make me a nervous wreck,” said an old woman seated on a gaudy chair just outside the padded gray doors that led into the performance space of the Hayworth Theater. “Why?” asked her friend, sitting on an adjacent chair while tightening the Velcro on her sneaker......

Poet Billy Collins Charms the Skirball Crowd

Dwayne Booth
Billy Collins, two-time U.S. poet laureate, walked out onto the stage at the Skirball Cultural Center, his bald head resting like an egg inside a wiry nest of gray hair, his face that of a mischievous 7-year-old boy who knows everything and is barely able to contain his glee, and......

Thinguma-Bobs: A Dylan Exhibit

Dwayne Booth
There we were, members of the press on preview night at the Skirball Cultural Center, poised at the top of a ramp like pinballs at the mouth of a chute leading into a flashing machine. The exhibit was called Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966, and curator Jasen Emmons, with the......

Q&A With The Realist's Paul Krassner at Chicago 10 Screening

Dwayne Booth
Hobbling on a cane with the flamboyant teeter of a man whose legs have been loosened at the hips to near separation from his body, Paul Krassner explained, swinging perilously this way and that, how the term "green room" originally referred to the chamber at San Quentin where prisoners awaited......
Credit: Illustration by Mr. Fish

David Sedaris at UCLA

Dwayne Booth
By now it's impossible to know for sure if David Sedaris is the most deeply gifted American humorist since Mark Twain due to his talent as a writer or as a reader. Maybe it's not a case of being one or the other, but both. Have Joan Baez pick up......

Ice Follies

Dwayne Booth
On a recent Saturday morning, I found myself inside the Los Angeles Sports Arena in Exposition Park, sitting 13 feet away from a girl wearing ice skates and a mermaid tail. I was choking back the tears and biting my lower lip to keep it from quivering, the same way......

Indigenous Indignation

Dwayne Booth
“Who are you again?” Martin Alcala, vice chair of California’s Tongva tribe, wanted to know. According to the literal meaning of their tribal name, the Tongva are “people of the earth.” Having survived for 100 centuries in Southern California, they are original Angelenos. So when I learned that the United......