by Deborah Granger
I’ve been deliberately cultivating his long attention span. Whatever he’s interested in, that’s the most important thing, so I encourage him to keep doing that as long as possible. I never say, “Come on! Let’s go. We’ll go to the beach or forest, and make things with sticks for five hours before he’s ready to switch. Other families come to the playground for 20 or 30 minutes, but we’d just stay there for hours, immersed in some newly invented game. Nobody else can hang with us like this. Everyone else gets so bored. Of course my adult mind wanders to all the other things we could be doing. But I let it go, and return to that present focus.
by Natalie Durkin
I arrive an hour prior to have a pre-show chat with Katie Mitchell, Kilo Tango’s frontwoman. I approach Katie at the bar where she’s with her friend and bassist, Caitlin Dee. She lights up like her fiery red hair and gives me a warm hug when I say, “Are you Katie?” We step outside to talk, Dee in tow. Mitchell tells me about her cottage cheese addiction, the café in Echo Park that has her heart, and how to do what you love and survive the meltdowns that come with it.
by Janice Bremec Blum
He wanted a moment from the final sequence of the Apartment where (spoiler alert) Jack Lemmon’s character finally expresses his love for Shirley MacClaine’s character and the only way we know how she feels about him, is by her facial expression as well as how she takes the cards from him.
by Janice Bremec Blum
This is a recent piece I did of Steve Martin from the poster for the Jerk, for an old friend. It is a perfect example of the extreme jump from one form of painting to another. On the one hand, the end goal of a detailed likeness (and doing a good job of it) to the freedom of creating shapes and using color without that particular pressure, just the joy of it AND the goal to do a good job of it (still considering the formal issues of the aesthetics of abstracts from what little I know of art history). I’m still informally a student of it.
by Natalie Durkin
I was at Urban Outfitters on Ventura Boulevard with a friend last spring when I ran into Molly Kirschenbaum. Warm, inviting, redheaded, and smiley, Molly, out shopping with her mom, was just a normal teenaged girl. But not to me.
Molly is a musical artist, known as Moollz. Before that encounter, I would often play her EP, Moon Fruit, because it took me out of the suburbs and to another galaxy with its trademark synth and Molly’s mesmerizing, inviting melodies.
by Deborah Granger
This summer, TribeLA Magazine contributor Natalie Durkin’s song of the week will help us uncover some of the brightest stars in our city, both established and emerging.
