“We Became Parents and Fell Out of Love”

Alison and Trevor were living together and considering marriage when Trevor’s sister Yvette — a single mom — was killed. Though he and Alison had been together eight months, they took in Yvette’s 4-year-old son, Donovan. But with Trevor nearly incapacitated by grief, the two were soon overwhelmed by their new responsibilities and conflicting parenting styles.

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This is Tribute Band Land

Nature abhors a vacuum, which is why nature is so into tribute bands. Say a classic band dies in a mysterious plane crash. Kablam!!! Fifteen tribute bands spring up before the NTSB has a clue of what went down. Artists don’t even have to be the victims of gnarly circumstances anymore to spawn tribute bands. They can be pouting in Malibu…while a red-hot tribute band named for their last hit is playing packed bars in the Valley and sucking face with their old groupies — a red-hot all-girl tribute band. I’m not sure if that’s hot or completely hot. But I am sure this is Tribute Band Land.

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Human Condition

The famously fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous came to mind while viewing Judith Barry’s recent exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica. The show features a pair of substantially reworked multimedia installations from the ’90s, including Barry’s signature Imagine, Dead Imagine.

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The Insiders

Note: I had the pleasure of interviewing and writing up profiles on several influential interior designers for a special “sources” issue of now defunct design magazine Elements of Living. For brevity’s sake, I cobbled together only the profiles that I wrote.

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Burning Man

Half pickup truck, half pig, the glowing blue roadhog turns left onto the bustling esplanade, its bemused expression as hard to decipher as its owner’s intentions. Kandy-kolored glowstick bicycles veer to avoid it, as do a half-dozen pedal-powered muffins and cupcakes. A convertible Cadillac spacecraft idles at the side of the bustling ring road, its passengers haranguing passersby from atop its beer-keg booster rockets.

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