Tom Christie

Train

This Is Not a Very Large Train Engine Hanging From a Crane at LACMA

Tom Christie
When the artist Jeff Koons told the crowd at LACMA last Thursday night that he’d sometimes worried that his signature pink blowup-bunny piece said a little too much about his sexuality, museum director Michael Govan responded wryly, “I’m going to be thinking about that for a while.” It was an......
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Fab Four

Tom Christie
The View at Spaceland, January 6 Outside Spaceland late Saturday night, a car screeched to a stop at the curb and a voice yelled out, “This is it!” Four young lads jumped out and did a swervy sort of dance to the sidewalk, followed by an older guy with a......
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Staff Recommends

Tom Christie
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño Even before his untimely death in 2003, I’d been repeatedly told that this wandering Chilean was the great Latin American writer of his generation. But people are always making such claims, and I didn’t listen. Then I read this seductive collection of stories......

Ou Est Bouillier?

Tom Christie
Getting into the Ma’kai Lounge in Santa Monica the other night was a disconcerting affair. For one thing, there were French people guarding the door. So much good hair, so many sweaters, so terribly expressive. They frighten! There were a lot more of them inside, all talking in a foreign......
(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

Best Honorable Engine Men (and Woman)

Tom Christie
Best Honorable Engine Men (and Woman) Pity the honest mechanic. Not just honest but fair, even kind and full of goodwill. For he cannot make a good living. Such is the challenge, perhaps the fate, of one Craig Kuromi, who with his brother Gary has been running Ise Automotive in......
(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

Splitting Hairs

Tom Christie
A funny thing happened on the way to the hair salon. A few years ago, Art Cardiel was cutting my hair. He was working in a salon in Los Feliz but wanted to strike out on his own, so he found this great space on Hollywood Boulevard near Vermont —......
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Auf Wiedersehen, Adele

Tom Christie
Only a couple of days remain until the five Gustav Klimt paintings, recently returned by Austria to the descendents of the couple that owned them before World War II, leave the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for New York. But this is also a rare chance to see the......

Paintings With Friends

Tom Christie
“Whoa,” said Jack Larson as we rounded a corner at the County Museum of Art and came face to face with two dachshunds. “This is a very moving show if you know his life.” The show is “David Hockney Portraits,” a retrospective organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London......

15 Writers Share Their Must-Reads

Tom Christie
DANIEL HANDLER (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events) Peter Rock’s The Bewildered (MacAdam/Cage) is a book that took me for a walk around my neighborhood, pointed out nineteen things I’d never noticed, led me to a bar with a great jukebox, listened while I blabbed all......

8 Angelenos on ArtReview's International Power 100 List

Tom Christie
(Last year’s position in parentheses.) 82. (NEW) Shaun Caley Regen, dealer/gallerist (Regen Projects) 79. (NEW) Ann Philbin, director, UCLA Hammer Museum 43. (44) Paul Schimmel, chief curator, MOCA 42. (94) John Baldessari, artist 39. (45) Ed Ruscha, artist 37. (NEW) Paul McCarthy, artist 6. (22) Eli Broad, collector 2. (1)......