Fifteen ways to divide your artistic attention this fall

LEONARD CUTROW’S ‘TRANSITION’ from ‘CALIFORNIA, SEEN’

A lot changes when fall finally comes flooding into Long Beach: the air turns just a tiny bit crisp, barbecues are left to rust on the patio and flip-flops give way to more fully-realized footwear. But most importantly, galleries get going with new exhibitions, scripts are put to the stage and the art world lights up once more. So it’s with that seasonal shift that we turn in our annual Fall Arts Guide, filling you in on some of the best ways to spend an artistic autumn, including everything from David Sedaris’ snot-rocket humor to Andy Warhol’s party Polaroids.

SEPTEMBER

Men in Suits: Wim Griffith ditches the usual leggy dames of the noir world and casts an eye on dashing men instead. The sense of hardboiled fantasy is still here—a detective rushing down an alleyway, gun in hand—but the femme fatale is nowhere to be found, left out in this man’s world of tailored trench coats and trousers. // MILES CLEMENTS

MEN IN SUITS FLAZH!ALLEY | 1113 S PACIFIC AVE | SAN PEDRO 90731 | FLAZHALLEYSTUDIO.COM | THROUGH SEPT 6

28 Plays Later: This is the Alive Theatre’s viral voice, a performance directed by Jasper Polecki Oliver for all those attention spans blunted by YouTube, a string of plays nimble enough to stand out in even the shortest of memories. The plays contained in the performance are described as being connected by “intrigue, humor and brevity.” But 28 Plays Later is captured most crucially in its tagline: “A shit-ton of fun in a wee-bit of time.” // MC

28 PLAYS LATER KOO’S ART CENTER | 530 E BROADWAY | LONG BEACH 90802 | ALIVETHEATRE.ORG | SEPT 7, 14 & 21 | $10

Tri-Art Festival: San Pedro’s second annual Tri-Art Festival descends again with everything from a classic car show (automobiles as art) to film, dance, sculpture and painting. Events are spread out over two days and a number of downtown locales, including the dreamily deco Warner Grand. Artists range from the San Pedro Ballet and Dance Company to Cao Yong, an official artist of the Beijing Olympics. // MC

TRI-ART FESTIVAL VARIOUS LOCATIONS | SAN PEDRO 90731 | TRIARTFESTIVAL.COM | SEPT 13&14

SoundWalk: Everything goes aural in the East Village with another installment of the world-famous SoundWalk. There won’t be much melody here, though—SoundWalk is a work of passive and interactive sculptures, environments, performances and installations that play with things like acoustics and conceptualization, clanging out sounds that share more with our audible environment than a structured song. // MC

SOUNDWALK EAST VILLAGE ARTS DISTRICT | LONG BEACH 90802 | SOUNDWALK.ORG | SAT SEPT 20

Garrison Keillor: By now, A Prairie Home Companion is the Rocky Horror Picture Show—two campy mid-1970s caricatures of Americana that during the last 30-some years have ossified into American grotesques. Of course, this brings us to Garrison Keillor, the adenoidal gargoyle who let’s just say is no Susan Sarandon, but shares some uncomfortable similarities with Tim Curry … and, it suddenly strikes me, with Captain Kangaroo.

So, okay, let’s just say a little more. After all, Keillor is coming to Long Beach, the erstwhile Iowa-By-The-Sea, which might be described as a sort of Lake Woebegone by way of Transexual, Transylvania—listen for it when Keillor brings A Prairie Home Companion to the Carpenter Center on Sept. 25. That and a couple jokes about how weird Californians are, some banjo music and an anecdote about how Lars the Norwegian pastor stubbed his toe ice fishing.

Keillor is the Dr. Frank-N-Furter of middle America, an absolutely terrifyingly attractive guy who’s gotten to have it both ways as he both skewers and celebrates the values and desires of an audience that’s so swept away by his schtick that it rarely bothers searching out an underlying message, anymore.

This is not to say we shouldn’t be grateful that Keillor is still loudly nose-breathing, lip-smacking and salivating us to distraction. (Little known fact: he achieves all those personal-hygiene noises by attaching a tiny microphone to his epiglottis.) What Keillor has been doing all these years—using the simpler technology of the past to perhaps connect listeners with that era and maybe even get them to consider today in a wider context—has remained unique, even if it increasingly feels tired and predictable. Keillor is as much a national treasure as the late Bob Keeshan, aka Captain Kangaroo.

Keeshan had a few tics, too, but boy did I miss him after he was gone—well, the idea of him, anyway. I’d stopped actually watching Captain Kangaroo long before he left the airwaves. I haven’t seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show in nearly as long. That’s what happens when you grow up. // DAVE WIELENGA

GARRISON KEILLOR CARPENTER CENTER | 6200 ATHERTON ST | LONG BEACH 90815 | CARPENTERARTS.ORG | THURS SEPT 25 8PM | $60-65

California, Seen: The collective corners of California come together in the Long Beach Museum of Art’s “California, Seen,” which gathers up every splotchy smokestack and dusty driveway of the California Scene movement. Conceived as a rebuttal of rigid European rules, California Scene painters (Millard Sheets, Phil Dike and Loren Roberta Barton are all included here) turned instead to the world around them, casting watercolored eyes on California’s midcentury boom. // MC

CALIFORNIA, SEEN LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART | 2300 E OCEAN BLVD | LONG BEACH 90803 | LBMA.ORG | SEPT 26 THROUGH JAN 11, 2009

OCTOBER

University by the Sea: The East Village gets converted into a classroom again as Smolarcorp sets up another University by the Sea. There’s plenty of education to be had (classes on the history of Long Beach, ballet and dance, cooking and more), but also a CSULB Student Film Festival, a special installation developed by SoundWalkers FLOOD and a live arts corridor filled with painters, actors and dancers all converging on downtown. There’s music, too, put on by the charitable Schooled in Song and highlighted by the newly Touch and Go-ed Crystal Antlers. // MC

UNIVERSITY BY THE SEA EAST VILLAGE ARTS DISTRICT | LONG BEACH 90802 | UNIVERSITYBYTHESEA.COM | SUN OCT 5

Blackwater Opera: Artist Jeremiah Hammer is Dear Earthling, but he doesn’t really need a pseudonym. His haunting custom renditions of Dunnies, Munnies, Uglydolls and Fatimas are one-of-a-kind ghostly vinyl toys that speak for themselves like few other entries in the adult display toy market. They’re not unlike some of the better names in vinyl toys—Skullbrain and Camille Rose Garcia, maybe—but special, because they’re one-offs. Also? He paints, which bodes extremely well for his show this fall at DDR Projects. There’s nothing better than seeing an artist branch out, even from something he does well. // THEO DOUGLAS

BLACKWATER OPERA 1532 E BROADWAY | LONG BEACH 90802 | DDRPROJECTS.COM | OCT 11 THROUGH NOV 6

A Beautiful Nothing: For a bit of a road trip, consider “A Beautiful Nothing: The Architecture of Edward A. Killingsworth,” the first show of its kind featuring the late architect responsible for such legendary midcentury Long Beach structures as the Opdahl house on Naples Island and the 1959 Marina Tower condominium model home in Bluff Park. Curated by Cara Mullio and Jennifer Volland, authors of Long Beach Architecture: The Unexpected Metropolis, the show features a number of Killingsworths which—like Marina Tower—were never built. // TD

A BEAUTIFUL NOTHING: THE ARCHITECTURE OF EDWARD A. KILLINGSWORTH UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM | UC SANTA BARBARA | SANTA BARBARA 93106 | 805.893.2951 | UAM.UCSB.EDU | THROUGH OCT 12

Between Earth and Heaven: If you know architect John Lautner at all, it’s for his Malin House in Los Angeles—otherwise known as the Chemosphere: a round, spaceship of a dwelling tethered to Earth only briefly. But Lautner, who built just one—count ’em, one—house in Long Beach’s Park Estates, spent his career fulfilling loftier aims, using buildings as vehicles to transform the way we lived. His results brought the outdoors in, and left us a variety of classic midcentury structures through which to remember him. // TD

BETWEEN EARTH AND HEAVEN: THE ARCHITECTURE OF JOHN LAUTNER HAMMER MUSEUM | 10899 WILSHIRE BLVD | LOS ANGELES 90024 | 310.443.7000 | HAMMER.UCLA.EDU | THROUGH OCT 12

David Sedaris: On the heels of his latest novel, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris—the Grammy Award-nominated author and radio contributor with enough self-depreciative humor to kill a mockingbird—is coming to the Long Beach Convention Center’s Terrace Theater on October 24.

If dysfunctional family tales and backside boil-lancing tickle your fancy, you’ll buy a ticket. And if you’re anything like me—a native of Sedaris’ frozen home of Binghamton, NY and a card-carrying member of the Family Dysfunction Association—you’ll eat him up . . . and then call your sister to tell her that your shared, scarring childhood was not an isolated incident. And that your relatives really were aliens. That your squeaky-clean neighbors must have eaten paint chips on Sundays. That your parents were just children with bigger bones and broken cars.

As far as I’m concerned, Sedaris’ family and my own are one in the same. Our mothers and fathers were IBM lifers. They couldn’t stand each other and were comically failed communicators. Our siblings were mailmen children. And we both could see no other alternative but to vanish to France. Marvelous fodder for a public lecture.

His novels—which should always be read in private—will inflict you with the most pleasant kind of snot-rocket laugher and abdominal pain. Live, though? My God, bring a hankie (maybe some disinfectant, a mop and some rubber gloves, too). // JENNY STOCKDALE

DAVID SEDARIS LONG BEACH PERFORMING ARTS CENTER | TERRACE THEATER | 300 E OCEAN BOULEVARD | LONG BEACH 90802 | LONGBEACHCC.COM | FRI OCT 24 8PM | $25-45 | TICKETS ON SALE AT TICKETMASTER OUTLETS AND AT THE LONG BEACH PERFORMING ARTS CENTER BOX OFFICE

Margaret Cho: Asian/gay/VH1 Celebreality icon Margaret Cho returns to Southern California in October with her newest and boldest stand-up show, “Beautiful.” This time around, Cho’s inward struggle with self-acceptance serves as the basis for an attack on today’s perceptions of beauty. After recently wrapping up a tour with a burlesque show, Cho finally felt she had gotten over feeling fat or old, saying it was “the ultimate beauty treatment.” This revelation led her to write “Beautiful,” a hilarious and empowering journey exploring the nature of beauty, what is funny and scary about it and why we often cannot feel beautiful—namely, because our society’s standards are so rigid and unattainable. Don’t forget to watch out for Cho’s signature impersonations of her mother, which have won the hearts of fans worldwide. // MARIE-REINE VELEZ

MARGARET CHO’S ‘BEAUTIFUL’ LONG BEACH PERFORMING ARTS CENTER | TERRACE THEATER | 300 E OCEAN BOULEVARD | LONG BEACH 90802 | LONGBEACHCC.COM | SAT OCT 25 7&10PM | $35-65 | TICKETS ON SALE AT TICKETMASTER OUTLETS AND AT THE LONG BEACH PERFORMING ARTS CENTER BOX OFFICE

NOVEMBER

Silk Stockings: Musical Theatre West’s adaptation of the classic Cole Porter musical arrives just in time for another round of reheated U.S.-Russian relations, presenting a comedy of Cold War consequences involving a U.S. director, a Soviet composer and a Russian spy. True to midcentury form, watch as those cold Soviet hearts thaw when met with the usual American indulgences—dancing, jazz and, yes, silk stockings. // MC

SILK STOCKINGS CARPENTER CENTER | 6200 ATHERTON ST | LONG BEACH 90815 | MUSICAL.ORG | NOV 7-23

Warhol: 15min/24fps: Pop Art pulls out the Polaroids with the University Art Museum’s Warhol exhibit, showcasing over 150 photos and prints given to UAM by the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts. In it are candid celebrity captures of Dennis Hopper, O.J. Simpson and others plus Cobrasnake-quality shots of all the Factory regulars flooding the New York party scene. // MC

WARHOL: 15MIN/24FPS UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM | CAL STATE LONG BEACH | 1250 BELLFLOWER BLVD | LONG BEACH 90840 | CSULB.EDU/ORG/UAM | NOV 13 THROUGH DEC 14

The Color Purple: The Oprah-approved adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel makes a stop at OCPAC as fall finally starts fading into winter. Despite the Grammy-nominated score and all the other associative elements of grandeur, the core of Walker’s work is still here: a story of abuse and oppression overcome by the applied power of faith. // MC

THE COLOR PURPLE SEGERSTROM HALL | ORANGE COUNTY PERFORMING ARTS CENTER | 600 TOWN CENTER DR | COSTA MESA 92626 | OCPAC.ORG | NOV 18 THROUGH NOV 30 | $28.50-88.50

Tags: andy warhol, David Sedaris, garrison keillor, long beach museum of art, margaret cho, university art museum