Mindy Farabee

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Brandon Christopher Has Had 82 Jobs and Only Left Feces at One

Mindy Farabee
At current count, 43-year-old Brandon Christopher has talked his way into 82 jobs — from a five-hour stint as a mortuary driver to a four-year gig writing and producing documentaries. In between, he had to file for unemployment just twice. His 83rd job — author of the just-published nonfiction collection......
The new book by former art critic Michael Fallon

How '70s L.A. Changed the Art World Forever

Mindy Farabee
Anyone who visited "Under Big Black Sun," MOCA’s 2011-12 Pacific Standard Time exhibit that took the fertile anarchy of '70s L.A. art as its theme, won’t have trouble grasping the thesis of art critic Michael Fallon’s new book, Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s. Fallon picks......
The new book by Pomona College econ professor Gary Smith

Poor Housekeeping Makes People Racist? No, It's Just the Data Fooling Us

Mindy Farabee
“There are three kinds of lies,” British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is purported to have said. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Disraeli would have enjoyed both the tone and the premise of economist Gary Smith’s often funny and frequently enlightening new book for a lay audience, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions,......
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Lan Cao

Mindy Farabee
The Lotus and the Storm, Lan Cao's high-profile follow-up to her best-selling debut, Monkey Bridge, revisits her preoccupation with how U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam continues to reverberate through both countries, via a family saga. Reportedly the first Vietnam War novel written by a Vietnamese-American, Monkey Bridge illustrated......
Gladys Park at Gladys and 6th Street

The Homeless Man Who Runs a Park

Mindy Farabee
A.J. Martin is taking a break. “I love it when it’s like this,” he says, cigarette in one hand, standing outside against the back door to the Ellis Hotel. It’s a breezy early summer afternoon in Gladys Park — a small patch of downtown greenery at the corner of Gladys......
Gillian Chadsey fainting in #aspellforfainting; Credit: Jim R. Moore/Vaudevisuals.com

This Play Asks the Audience to Tweet During the Performance

Mindy Farabee
Ladies and gentlemen, the show is about to begin. Please, turn on your cell phones.  Because when New York’s WaxFactory company brings its experimental one-act #aspellforfainting to L.A. this weekend, theater-goers for once will be allowed — nay, encouraged — to live tweet the whole thing in a piece that......
Sera (Jena Kirmse)

Cave, a Play That Takes Place in a Cave

Mindy Farabee
Located near Griffith Park’s Camp Hollywoodland, the Bronson Caves are actually more of a tunnel, about 50 foot long with three entrances, dug by a quarry company around the turn of the last century. Everyone from John Wayne to Batman has used it as a film location since. Next weekend,......
Playwright and Watts Village Theater Company artistic director Lynn Manning

A Hollywood Satire Performed on the Streets of Watts

Mindy Farabee
Late on a recent Thursday evening, Watts Village Theater Company members gather in a large, nearly bare room on the fifth floor of the L.A. Theatre Center. The second week of rehearsals for WVTC's new site-specific spoof, Hollywood in the Hood, has just commenced, and two groups of actors, not......