Right before the press preview for Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind began, we were invited to add wishes to one of the olive trees in the plaza outside the entrance to The Broad. I picked up a small white tag and a pen and wrote a single world. Peace. Simple and inoffensive, I thought. Or, maybe not. Peace is complicated according to the politicians who say we need to bomb our way to it. And peace is offensive according to the people who get completely bent out of shape when you suggest that our tax money might be more wisely spent on— IDK— education and health care instead of constant war. But, I know for a fact that I wasn’t the first person who tied a hope for peace onto the Wish Trees for Los Angeles installation and it’s safe to assume that many more will do the same before the exhibition ends in October. 

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, which began its tour at London’s Tate Modern two years ago, is a career retrospective of the avant-garde artist that takes visitors from the mid-20th century to the fairly recent past. The exhibition’s stop at The Broad marks Ono’s first ever museum solo show in Southern California, so it is a landmark event and one that shouldn’t be missed. 

For the completely uninitiated, Ono is a multidisciplinary artist who has been active since the 1950s. She was raised primarily in Japan, her childhood coinciding with World War II. After attending Sarah Lawrence, she settled into New York City’s art vanguard. In the 1960s, Ono linked up with the Fluxus art movement and released work that would go on to become influential, like the book Grapefruit and the performance Cut Piece. Then, at the end of the decade, she married John Lennon, who was still in The Beatles and arguably one of the world’s biggest rock stars of the time. Ono and Lennon collaborated with each other extensively on music and art until his death in 1980. In fact, on the day Lennon was murdered, the two had just finished recording “Walking on Thin Ice,” which would become a massive dance floor hit for multiple generations of club kids. In the ensuing decades, Ono continued to make music and art. She’s known for large-scale projects like the Wish Tree series and the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland. Now 93, Ono has spent the past handful of years out of the spotlight, but her work is frequently reassessed and dissected as more people realize that she’s always been far ahead of her time. 

Read more in “Imagine Peace with Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at The Broad” 

New Music

There’s a lot of new music on my laptop right now, but I haven’t had a ton of spare time to write about it. One album I’m into right now is the self-titled debut from Devlin and the Harm, who I interviewed recently. Excerpt below: 

Devlin McCluskey had been on a Sopranos kick that sent him down a music rabbit hole. Remember the episode where Christopher relapses, with carnival lights twinkling and Fred Neil’s song “The Dolphins” playing in the background? “That set off me obsessively listening to that song and then trying to find more songs that sounded like that,” McCluskey says on a recent video call from Cathedral City, where the formerly L.A.-based musician now lives. 

That Sopranos needle drop prompted McCluskey, previously of The Dead Ships and now of Devlin and the Harm, to dig into more sounds of the 1960s and 1970s that were unfamiliar to him. There was “Something on Your Mind” from the bluesy singer Karen Dalton and Scott Walker’s “The Old Man Is Back Again” and playlists loaded with Donovan tunes. “I’m the kind of person who will listen to one song over and over and over or start my morning listening to one song every morning for months and months,” says McCluskey. That was the case here.

All of this seeps into Devlin and the Harm’s recently released, self-titled debut album. Opening with a hint of Ennio Morricone’s Old West on “Kingdom Comes,” the album hits a melancholic nerve and, while the music isn’t particularly retro, the sound throughout recalls some of the eeriness of 1960s and early 1970s productions. 

Read more

DJ Gigs

I’m back at Club Underground tonight for Darkwave Night. Join us at the Grand Star Jazz Club, right next to the Bruce Lee statue in Chinatown’s Central Plaza from 9:30 p.m. until 2 a.m. Advance tickets are available online. And, if you’re going to see Ladytron at The Novo on Friday night, stop by after the show. Your concert ticket will get you into Underground for free! 

If you’re looking for something to do later this weekend or early next week, I have some recommendations, including Camera Obscura at Pacific Electric and American Cinematheque’s Bleak Week. Head over to Beatique for the details. And, if you need some tunes, go to Mixcloud for this month’s mix, which includes Velvet Underground, Beach House, Dry Cleaning, Fcukers, Tomora and more. 

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and I hope to see you on the dance floor. 

Liz O.