Read and Listen to the Interview

#gallery-1 {
margin: auto;
}
#gallery-1 .gallery-item {
float: left;
margin-top: 10px;
text-align: center;
width: 33%; }
#gallery-1 img {
border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;
}
#gallery-1 .gallery-caption {
margin-left: 0;
}

It’s a beautiful Thursday afternoon in the Brentwood hills, peaceful and quiet as though I’m no longer in L.A. The Southwest-style clubhouse of the Riviera Country Club stands gallant and vast, like the home of a Columbian drug lord, and I’m here for the quarterly luncheon of the Saint John’s Retired Physician’s Association. In spite of my shadowy past as an amateur surgeon and street pharmacist, I am in fact here to interview the former Los Angeles District Attorney and now prominent photographer Gil Garcetti, who is today’s main speaker. But I’m sweating in the sun while taking these notes and must move toward the clubhouse. Suddenly, I wonder if there’s a no-denim policy here, as is customary among country clubs. I’m wearing blue jeans. The sign just outside the main entrance reads Proper Attire Required… Not sure exactly what that means.

In a profession where a graduate level degree qualifies you to cut paper and a fifty hour week is considered part-time, architect Eric Owen Moss is fairly easy-going without being easy. Ask a seemingly simple question of Moss, and you shall elicit an answer that draws on philosophy, symphonic composition, and a good-natured frontier sensibility. While Moss has won major competitions in China, Mexico, and Russia, and is currently designing the Patent Office Building of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., he is still something of a hometown secret. He lacks the studied grandeur of some of his more well-known contemporaries, but to good effect. Without that PR sheen, it’s possible to have an actual conversation with him, if actual conversations are defined as extended discussions about the construct of history.

Val Patterson is a Photographer born, raised & currently residing in Los Angeles. She is best known for her charity photo book “The Pink Project,” which benefits the fight against breast cancer & sexual assault. Val is currently working on her next two books, “The Mona Lisa Project” & “Sleepwalking in Palos Verdes,” which are scheduled for release in the Fall of 2010.

As of my experience at the Electric Daisy Carnival this summer, I can’t say the latter opinions have been all that much altered. What has been altered is my sense that rave is dead. I was astonished by the phenomenon that flooded the downtown Coliseum. You can tell a lot about a culture when 70,000 young people show up barely wearing anything . Teenage rave is a massively developed subculture that I had no idea about. It was a 12-hour teenage pop-culture Halloween.