Confession: The Santa Monica pier is not a particularly supernatural setting to do an interview with the star of a very supernatural franchise’s fourth installment. The quicker we get past that, the more we’ll all just be able to focus on the beautiful woman strolling up the boardwalk, in casual black pants and a sweater, aviator glasses blocking out the unseasonable grayness, and blocking in the face that is so recognizable for its graceful cheekbones and slender, sharp features. Kate Beckinsale’s first admission to me is that she’s never put her fingers on a Ouija board’s stylus. “In England,” she’s quick to point out, “it’s kind of up there with taking the head off a chicken.” ...
The warning track | Baseball’s Sartorial MVP Cleans Up Nice
In 100 years, music will be all but unrecognizable—techno/country/pop/rock will give way to new technologies and styles. Art will have gone through a dozen movements until the only thing that’s left is the meta-conceptual. Fashion will exist in a completely different context, or may not even exist at all, or bras will shoot laser beams to fend off perves. The polar icecaps will definitely be melted. Oil may be phased out, god willing. Wars will be fought, and disasters of all walks will shake our foundation, and the world’s finances will go through a series of changes. America may not be...
Romanian Art Wrestles with A Budding Contemporary Significance
There’s a cluster of low-rise buildings tucked off La Cienega Avenue in Culver City that looks like an office park—an odd extension of the prominent galleries here. The sun beats down on the area’s paved interior and it’s a relief to duck into Mihai Nicodim’s aircon-ed space. The dealer is smoking cigarettes in a concrete alcove out back, the combination of tobacco and cement creating a particularly Eastern Bloc atmosphere. But this is Los Angeles, home to sunshine girls and surfer dudes, and contrasts as such are easily, if not welcomingly, made. Nicodim’s harsh features...
The Layered Force of A Contemporary Character
It’s a warm and sunny summer afternoon in New York, free from the goddamned humidity that spoils most of the season in this city. Outside the Breslin Bar at the too-hip Ace Hotel, shorts-clad, sunglass-masked guys and girls walk by slowly, as if worried that picking up the pace might cause unsightly perspiration and ruin the whole effect. Inside, Michael Shannon is talking about snapping bones. ...
A Steaming, Black Journey from the Cherry to the Mug
Who doesn’t love a woodsy, shade-grown cuppa in the morning? Certainly no one we’d consort with. What’s better than heart-shaped crema atop a single-origin, five-and-a-half ounce cappuccino? Um, nothing. You see, it’s simple. Our hearts flutter at the sound of a grinding bean in the early a.m., the birthing of an earthy brew to follow, because hitting the pavements of our modern jungles is exhausting, energy-sucking, even lacking in taste. Which is why, for some of us, coffee is the best part of our day’s start, a sedative for the chupacabra...
The Beloved Actor Leads the Big Picture Conversation
He’s got a gun. Ian Somerhalder is balancing on a sunlounge precariously, with one foot cocked on the railing of the sixth-floor hotel room. He’s holding a three-foot hunting rifle aimed straight at the cars zipping down Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. He puts his left hand to his eyes to shield the sun, he brings the rifle down, aims, and then… He’s passed a phone. The photographer in an adjacent wing of the hotel tells him to aim a little more to the left, look a little more menacing. Somerhalder is posed, hard.
“Here is the problem: university and...
It has been a warm night, and the earth slinks toward the equinox; you’ve just sent your beloved to bed for the last time with a dosage of deadly nightshade. Why did you do it? Because she was running her mouth, questioning your mastery of the occult. It’s sick, it’s shameful, but it’s true. You pour yourself a sweet carafe, sit back at your desk, and let the remorse take hold, thence quilling out an incantation for Spells in Preparation of the Afterlife.
You take notice. Before her lasting and final rest, she lit a candle as deep and hypnotic as a black iris. It crackles. Another flame, smelling of a forest wrought with dead...
