Packed with variety and energy, ‘Insights’ makes art look simple

MATTHEW OHM’S ‘UNTITLED’
Pity the folks tasked with installing “Insights 2008,” the Cal State Long Beach Art Department’s annual juried exhibition at University Art Museum (UAM). This show seems to grow every year.
When I visited, the installers were still hard at work atop fiberglass ladders, and everywhere [...]

You can read Kurt Anderson’s ‘How to Back Up a Trailer’…or you can just back up a trailer

If you don’t know how to back up a trailer, change a tire or shuffle cards like a pro, you may not be from this planet. In which case, Kurt Anderson’s How to Back Up a Trailer . [...]

Paul G. Maziar and Matt Maust’s new book makes you make sense of it

The ideas and personal revelations about the mundane in What It Is: What It Is won’t make sense if you don’t want them to.
That’s because writer Paul G. Maziar’s and graphic artist/photographer/Cold War Kids bassist Matt Maust’s collaboration feels like an existential [...]

Painter Aaron Kraten remembers fixing Vespas, fooling pay phones and feeling out of place

AARON KRATEN’S ‘CALIBRATION’
Everyone knows Santa Ana multimedia painter Aaron Kraten for his signature sad-girl image. But Kraten, 34, has led a variegated life, doing everything from fixing motor scooters to running a thrift store to designing video games before becoming a full-time [...]

Long Beach author David Mark Dannov talks about writing, and reading at Acres of Books
Most writers are thankful to publish three books in a lifetime. Long Beach-based author David Mark Dannov accomplished that feat in one day, dropping three volumes of poetry via his own imprint, Black Joke Press, then reading selections at Acres of [...]

Two storied playwrights and a relative newcomer make for must-see theatricality

“BRITANNICUS” by KEITH IAN POLAKOFF
Considering that across-town theaters are staging plays by Nobel literature laureates and pillars of European drama, it’s got be a bit humbling for Tom Jacobson to see his name in lights on Long Beach Playhouse’s marquee.
But while Harold Pinter and Jean [...]

It’s good, but we’ve had ‘What They Have’ before

PHOTO by HENRY DIROCCO
If you loved HBO’s Six Feet Under, you’ll wish that What They Have was about a dysfunctional family that runs a quirky suburban funeral parlor. This new play by Kate Robin (one of the writers of the late cable-TV series) has everything that made [...]

Gabriela Martinez puts her life on display

EL CALDO DE PATO by GABRIELA MARTINEZ
On average, Gabriela Martinez’s linocuts each take 30 hours of work, but “The World Never Let Us Down,” her MFA thesis exhibition that incorporates them, was a life in the making.
“I always wrote stories when I was young, in journals,” Martinez says. “I [...]

Gord Peteran redefines what it means to be a chair

GORD PETERAN’S “MUSICAL BOX”
Gord Peteran’s furniture sort of explains a lot of things, possibly even why Wickes just went bankrupt. The 34 creations in “Furniture Meets Its Maker,” now wrapping up a two-year traveling show at the Long Beach Museum of Art, include tables of junk [...]

‘Women of Troy’ is a painful lesson on casualties of war

PHOTO by KEITH IAN POLAKOFF
Women of Troy opens on a meeting between gods, Poseidon (Juan Carlos Parada) and Athena (Ivana Karapandzic) considering a just-wrapped 10-year war (victorious Greeks on one side, Trojans on the other) and, here comes the sort of interesting twist for Team [...]