Kristine McKenna

Joe Frank; Credit: Issa Sharp

Joe Frank: Off the Radio

Kristine McKenna
It’s been six years since radio dramatist Joe Frank stopped producing new episodes for his weekly show on KCRW, The Other Side. His fans haven’t forgotten him, though. That was evident last year, when Café Largo presented Frank’s The BlueRoom, a performance that quickly sold out its four-show run. Although......
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Elsa Longhauser

Kristine McKenna
When Elsa Longhauser was named executive director in June 2000*, the Santa Monica Museum of Art took a quantum leap forward. Founded in 1989, when Abby Sher hired Frank Gehry to design a commercial-use property that included the museum on the site of the former Edgemar Farm Dairy, on Main......

Eye of the Storm

Kristine McKenna
Prior to arriving in Los Angeles in 1978, photographer Ann Summa hitchhiked across the African continent. By herself. Obviously, challenging situations don’t fa...
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Eye of the Storm

Kristine McKenna
Prior to arriving in Los Angeles in 1978, photographer Ann Summa hitchhiked across the African continent. By herself. Obviously, challenging situations don’t fa...

Armand and Dangerous

Kristine McKenna
Six years ago Ann Philbin ended a nine-year run at New York’s Drawing Center to shake the dust off the Hammer, a vanity museum opened by oil magnate Armand Hammer in 1990. Hammer’s death just one month after his museum opened left it in the lurch, and it took nearly......

The Wrath of Werner

Kristine McKenna
Photo by Debra DiPaolo A central figure in Germany’s film renaissance of the 1970s, Werner Herzog has developed a distinctive style revolving around society’s dispossessed — freaks, autistics, deranged visionaries — with the larger subject being the collective madness of civilization. Herzog claims to direct animals and landscapes, both of......
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Agent Provocateur

Kristine McKenna
There are hundreds of niche markets in the publishing world, and Tosh Berman’s TamTam Books has surely cornered one of them. Describing TamTam’s terrain is challenging: Obscure French fiction? Writings by French cult figures? French writers who are heavily involved with music? TamTam’s stable of writers — which includes Guy......

Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain

Kristine McKenna
I grew up in Orange County, which, in my opinion, is like coming from Mars. So the minute I graduated from brand-X Orange County college, I moved to Los Angeles. My first stop was a storefront loft at the corner of Pico and Redondo — a neighborhood I found terrifying......

The Curator As Artist

Kristine McKenna
Anyone who had the good fortune to spend time with Walter Hopps probably hasn’t forgotten the experience. Lots of people profess to have an interest in art, but to hear Hopps hold forth on any of the hundreds of artists, living and dead, whom he knew about was to know......

In the Beginning

Kristine McKenna
Photo by Debra DiPaolo Jay Levin was born in New York in 1943. His father was a tool-and-die maker and a used-car salesman, so I guess you could say Levin was a working-class kid. He was also a smart kid who read a lot, and he was ambitious. After graduating......