Tom Christie

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Harold's Office

Tom Christie
Arts editor, senior features editor 1995-present I’m proud of many stories I’ve been responsible for in my 13 (gasp!) years at L.A. Weekly. They include the Literary L.A. issue written by David Ulin; Barry Lopez’s memoir of growing up in Los Angeles; Robert Lloyd’s opus on session men; Alan Rich’s......
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SMMOA and LACE Put the Fun in Fund-raisers

Tom Christie
The easiest way to explain the distinct pleasures of INCOGNITO, the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s annual art sale on May 3, is to share my own experience the first time I attended. Here’s the setup: The museum sends an 8x10 art board to 400 participating artists, who paint on......
Sol Shankman and City Councilman Tom LaBonge(Photos by Tom Christie)

Sol's Day

Tom Christie
It’s 7 a.m. Sunday morningand, like every other morning for the past 30 years, Sol Shankman is heading out onto the trails of Griffith Park. Today he begins at Boy Scout Drive and Vermont Avenue, the only trail on the east side of the observatory not closed by the recent......
LACMA director Michael Govan with Dan Flavin’s untitled (to Robert

The Encyclopedic City

Tom Christie
To understand what Michael Govan is doing in Los Angeles, you need to know what he did to get here. Twenty years ago, Govan, now the CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the L.A. County Museum of Art, was an art student at UC San Diego. He was also an......
(Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

The Newcomer

Tom Christie
{mosimage}Gary Garrels is a sign, an omen. Two years ago, he was ensconced at the Museum of Modern Art as chief curator of drawings and a curator of painting and sculpture. Maybe, as you’ll hear, he wasn’t so happy there, but 10 years ago the person with that sort of......
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What Do Your Presets Say About You?

Tom Christie
Tell us about your other bands, and their relation to the Presets (historically and currently). Why just the two of you and what are the pros and cons, musically and otherwise? MOYES: The band we were in before, Prop, came together when we were at music school. It had five......

Seipp addl

Tom Christie
SANDRA TSING LOH It is true some of us here today will be allowed to age well past, as Cathy infamously said about columnist Bob Scheer, our “sell by” date. I’d stop to apologize. But then I’ll have to apologize to everyone I’m about to offend in remembering Cathy. And......
(Photo by Emmanuelle Richard)

A Differing Opinion

Tom Christie
The writer and blogger Cathy Seipp, who died last week at 49, once asked her friend Greg Critser if he thought her lung cancer was divine retribution for being mean. Critser, pointing out that Ann Coulter was still alive, told her this couldn’t possibly be true. Seipp had laughed, of......
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The Liberation of Baghdad

Tom Christie
The artist Sandow Birk is completing 15 large woodblock prints about the war in Iraq. Based on a series of small etchings by the French artist Jacques Callot (1592–1635) called “The Miseries of War,” which in turn inspired Goya’s “The Disasters of War” some 200 years later, Birk’s series is......
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Places That Make You Shake

Tom Christie
“I love your book. Call me.” That message, delivered in an e-mail from Tin House editorial director Lee Montgomery, was classic, but for the first-time author who received it, Michele Matheson, the journey to get there was something else — unless you consider descent into the junkie nightmare classic as......