Thoughtful perspectives on selecting your upscale grave
 Large, freestanding, and often rectangular outside advertisements are known as billboards. Here in Los Angeles there are a number of them, alerting potential consumers to available goods and services.
The Forest Lawn Memorial Parks, a franchise of high-quality, well-maintained, tourist-friendly ossuaries and crematoria, advertise their trendy boneyards via billboard campaigns that speak to our gentle acceptance of the mortality of our loved ones and ourselves.
Below are several of my own attempts to hit the right note with Forest Lawn's target audience, but I didn't get the gig.
Previously: Wish you were here (and dead); L.A. is burning
See also: Forest Lawn Memorial ParksLabels: advertising, art, billboards, cemetery, forest lawn, los angeles
Fabiola prays for a restraining order
 Canonized in the sixth century, Fabiola, who in life divorced her abusive husband and started a hospital for indigent women in Rome, is recognized as the matron saint of nurses. In this exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 300 representations of her trademark look have been collected from flea markets and garage sales by Mexico City architect and artist Francis Alys.
It is one of those exhibits that is about the exhibit and not the art. The program notes are quick to point out that the pictures' "lowly status is incontestable."
But the renderings of Saint Fabiola - draped in red, facing left - are all over the map. Paint, oil, wood, even beans are used to create her likeness, which itself came from a lost 19th century painting by Jean-Jacques Henner, no relation to Marilu or to Doug Henning.
 Because my artistic forte is to add .66 percent to existing collections, a discipline I call sexasectumism, I have placed two more representations of Fabiola in the collection, one made from bone and skin and the other from common McDonaldland dairy substitutes. I wonder if anyone will notice. I wonder when the grant money will come in.
Though born in the fourth century and by no means an A-List saint like Francis or Augustine, Fabiola proves through these loving outsider tributes that she is no Holla Back Girl.
See also: Fabiola at LACMALabels: art, los angeles, pop
The Faunz reimagined
 I watched Pan's Labyrinth the other night and was a little upset by how one of my favorite television characters, The Fonz, was recharacterized as a menacing, child-frightening monster.
Not since Wayne Rogers' happy go lucky character in M*A*S*H became the dour Pernell Roberts interpretation in Trapper John, MD has an iconic character from my youth been so poorly treated.
Despite this, Pan's Labyrinth is a beautiful, beguiling, and poignant movie that nevertheless puts me as a parent yet again on edge: What's with the goddamn faeries leading children away? It seems that, throughout literature, faeries are the manifestation of a parent's - and therefore society's - failure to keep children entertained.
I resolve to feed my daughter more gum.
The Stolen Child - William Butler Yeats
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand. See also: Pan's Labyrinth official siteLabels: art, movies, netflix odyssey, poetry
Sneaking up on Simon Bolivar
 I was in San Francisco this weekend and encountered Simon Bolivar, liberator of Venezuela, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia astride his horse in front of City Hall.
"Hey, Simon," I said. He kept looking the other way.
"Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey Simon, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey Simon. Look over here. Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey Simon."
Finally I got tired.
"You look like Abraham Lincoln," I said.Labels: art, california, latin america, san francisco, simon bolivar
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