Fellow Style Councilor Lina LeCaro has been busy suckling her newborn these last few weeks, so our friend Jar, a talented writer who lives in Echo Park and drives a hearse, has offered to contribute reportage from around LA.  Here he tells us about drkrm.gallery's Low-Brow Art Show, a group exhibition featuring work by Keith Weesner, Coop, Skratch, Max Grundy and others with fun names like “Nick O'Teen”, “Grimb” and “Tingler”.   And then he tells us about David Lynch's new movie, which apparently, is a 'fucking smorgasbord of Lynchness'. Enjoy!

low-brow: adj.  Lacking taste and/or elements capable of sustaining intellectual interest.

Low Brow was a term casually flung at the underground girls-and-hot rods/kounter-kulture art world some years ago, yet most of the incredible art that gets lumped under this term is anything but tasteless or intellectually bereft.  Perhaps the term has stuck because many of the “low-brow” artists are indeed a neanderthalian lot obsessed with curvy pin-up girls, drooling, cartoon-y monsters and unfinished, old school hot rods.  So…..after prying my eyes away from the several wickedly gorgeous, tatted-up, red-scarfed suicide-y girls in attendance, it was time to check out the art.  What's to stop a custom shop pin-stripe professional from going nuts on a slice of Detroit sheet metal torched off a fifty-year old car?  Nothing, that's what.  And no pesky hot rod owner telling you to tone it down either.  These guys like bright, glossy colors and aren't afraid to use them.  As do their women, who frequently wind up in the art.  Also on the walls were spectacularly decorated skateboard undersides, communist propaganda poster-inspired art, high quality rock show photographs and a few pieces that looked like the curator needed to fill some wall space:  “Hey man,….got anything else?”  “Well, I got this old one of a cartoon monster driving a hot rod that I did when I was 14….”   Lots of artists are listed on the promo, but there's not a heckuvalotta art here.  Still, it's definitely worth checking out.

Free valet parking, free booze (opening reception only) and the cleanest art space you'll ever see, the drkrm gallery rocks it with class.

After that it was time to check out the latest David Lynch mind-fuck “INLAND EMPIRE” (Mr. Lynch prefers all caps in this title). David Lynch is the “Angriest Dog in the World” growling and straining against the chains of Hollywood's “commercial success” gulag.   Along comes the sweetly graceful, willowy Laura Dern in a long-ish, white gauzy vintage dress and heels.  She's got a bolt cutter.  She kneels down and cuts the angry dog loose.  The dog runs everywhere in all directions so fast that it explodes.  She picks up the bone fragments, bloody guts and bits of fur and pieces the film together guided by the ghost spirit of David Lynch.  This movie is a Laura Dern tour-de-force and easily Lynch's scariest ever.  In places, the soundtrack alone will scare the hell out of you.  But there's also funny bits in true deadpan Lynchian fashion.  If you're a David Lynch fan, INLAND EMPIRE is a fucking smorgasbord of Lynchness, 3 mind-bending hours of it.  Get to it.  See it on the big screen with the big sound, baby, before it's 15 minutes are swallowed up by the indifferent, deadly hive of mass consumers who are sure to ignore it.

THANKS JAR!!!

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