Past Stories
Ethereal Abstractions and Primordial Soup
Rapidly asserting itself as the force to be reckoned with, Pomona Arts Colony’s dba256 Gallery has erected another monument to innovative California artists. In her second exhibit, Liquid Light, dba director Andi Campogno...
He of Ennui
if Tom Perrotta (Election, Little Children) has a gift, it’s that he can manage to give a novel a mounting sense of dread, even when there’s nothing specifically dreadful inherent to a situation. You watch his characters go...
Cold Miscalculation
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a distant, arrogant commander, more interested in politics than policy and surrounded by a coterie of men who put ideology over facts, manipulates intelligence to serve his own agenda, sends ...
Embrace Your Sexy Menstrual Cycle!
At first glance, the Girly Show flyer, which promotes Chaffey College’s new exhibit on “Pin-ups, Zines & the So-Called Third Wave,” looks like a page torn from a rockabilly calendar hung in a 1950’s ...
Down the Caspian Drain
“There’s such a thing as too much hope,” the character known only as The Tango Dancer tells Yass, the little girl who narrates Gina B. Nahai’s fourth novel, Caspian Rain. In this simple sentence she cuts to the chase of...
Hot, Sexy Midget
Confuse the demented and downright dirty short stories of Jerry Stahl with those of O. Henry? I don’t think so. But Stahl himself poses the O. Henry comparison in one of the tales that make up his first collection of…
Something To Shoot For
Sociologist Lisa Jean Moore doesn’t mince words in her book Sperm Counts: Overcome By Man’s Most Precious Fluid. Gizzum, cum, spunk, baby gravy and a few terms new to me (gentleman’s relish) are all there, in the first se...
HIGH ON HUNTER
Confession: we didn’t think much of Ralph Steadman’s bug-eyed illustrations for Hunter Thompson’s FearandLoathingIn LasVegas when we first saw them. Maybe it was the drugs we were on. A friend explained it best: “Stea...
ART ATTACK!
We were reminded of the power of images recently when Target stores, under right-wing, pro-capitalist pressure, decided to discontinue a CD case sporting Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s picture. The attacks from the Wall Street J...
Grave Beauty
Photographer Dick George has an eye for the strange, the illusory, the easily overlooked. Traveling in the rural southwest five years ago, the Arizona-based artist found himself drawn to an unusual subject matter. In dust...
Like Drowning in Asphalt
The first impression one has when standing in the midst of the Wignall Museum’s new Invisible Trajectories: Passing through the Inland Empire exhibit can be summed up in three letters: T.M.I.
That’s not to say...
Letting Pynchon Be Pynchon
Once a novelist is declared one of our best living writers, are critics obliged to kill him off? Or does he do himself in? In the strange and stranger case of famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon, both seem true.
Pynchon came…
Merchants, Myths and Missionaries
If you think America’s current foreign policy in the Middle East is delusional, compare it to that of 1795. Then the fledgling U.S. government was paying 20 percent of its total revenue to the Barbary states to prevent its me...
Coming Clean
Ron Jeremy! You’ve just had sex with 4,000 different partners (some more than a few times). What are you going to do now?
The answer, as Jeremy relates in his new autobiography Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz...
Tune Peddler
Of all the things believed to be capable of changing the world back in the 1960s—love, drugs, rock & roll—only rock delivered. Love, a delusional concept for centuries, didn’t really change anything—people just went...
Gray Sex
Even fictional men get old. But do they learn anything? We first met Duane Moore over 40 years ago in The Last Picture Show, the landmark novel of small-town decay by the prolific Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, Terms Of Endearm...
Diggin’ Deitch
Our choice for the Great American Novel is not about a boy named Huck, a sailor obsessed with a whale, or a jazz-age millionaire. It’s about a cat—an evil, hallucinatory blue cat—named Waldo. And it’s not a novel at all...
High Culture
I discovered magic mushrooms about the same time the rest of the world did. The difference between me and the rest of the world was that I lived in a rural valley renowned for its picking. We had culinary as…
Sold Out?
Over the last ten years we in the U.S. have seen an endless series of political books, at first mostly from the Right, and finally–now that publishing houses have awoke to the fact that the Dems, liberals and progressives...
Atheist Offensive
…my parents had been mildly disappointed when I’d said I didn’t believe in God any more, but being an atheist was another thing altogether.
—Julia Sweeney
They are the most reviled group in the country if...
Dink and Pootie’s Politics
Class war is a top-down affair with the poor taking almost all the casualties. That’s why it’s strange that the term is used—as a pejorative—mostly by those at the top. Challenge the accumulation of wealth or ca...
As Beauty Does
We all know the proverbial wisdom about beauty. It’s skin deep. It’s fleeting. It is what it does. Natsuo Kirino’s newly translated novel Grotesque confirms all these proverbs, and not prettily. It’s a d...
New Kids on the ARTsBlock
Due North: 13 UC Grads Are Taking Contemporary Art in the Right
Direction
As a local critic endlessly on the lookout for good art in
the Inland Empire, all I can say is—thank God for Sweeney. The most
reliable venu...
Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me
If you ever have the chance to sit down with Gallery Director and co-owner of dba256 Andi Campognone as I did, be prepared to walk away with one hell of an arts education–perhaps even indoctrination into artistic and capi...
Art Meritocracy
On Saturday, August 18th, Soul Expressions Tattoo Studio once again reinvented itself into an art gallery, hosting the Give Me 5 on the Down Low art show. Featuring pieces from contributors as local as the resident tattoo artis...
Out of This World
The notion that the world outside has become so distasteful that people are now, en masse, turning inward for solace is probably too obvious to restate. But I did it anyway. And while art often serves to take us to…
Riverside Metropolitan Museum’s Chinese Moon Festival at the Heritage House
The Moon Festival, which takes place on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month, is to the Chinese what Thanksgiving and Christmas are to the Western world–a time of joy, renewal and abundance. Families gather to watch as the...
Back To the Future
We have seen the future, thanks to science fiction author Philip K. Dick, and it looks like the present . . . even when it’s set in the past. No, we don’t fly around it rocket-powered hovercraft, there are no…
