Anna Webber – Los Angeles Photographer

Devendra Banhart plays live at Space15Twenty, Hollywood, CA

By Anna Webber

Devendra Banhart, the family affair
By Anna Webber

Chronicle Books, Filter magazine and Space15Twenty kicked off  a month-long gallery event Saturday with the ³Family: Photographs by Lauren Dukoff² Book signing and celebrational gathering with special guests Devendra Banhart, Matteah Baim, Ariana Delwari, Hecuba, and others.

It’s dusk in Hollywood, the devoted arrive early, the restless in line, the new-age hippie kids of Los Angeles, Topanga, and Laurel Canyon feed in and usher through the chipped brick corridors of the open air venue. They want to reminisce and imagine what it was, and existentially adhere to the dream. They are there to sit in Lauren Dukoff’s shoes, the one lucky enough of all of us to have been there at the right time, to have high-schooled with Devendra, a few years younger. It’s the Almost Famous story of a kid who got hooked in, literally, hooked in, and mentored by the new ones. Not the Rainbow children who weave baskets and sleep in vans, no longer the sort from obsolete Woodstock communes of 50 years ago. But so much the same, yet so much more innocent.

Members of the Family include Devendra, Joanna Newsom, Bat For Lashes, Vetiver, Cibelle, Hecuba and more. Lauren, with her long black pigtailed hair, rosy cheeks and dark, purple eyes, has photographed them all. She sits behind a table of books, posters, and flyers, hugging hippie boy after hippie girl, scrawling loose signatures across each of her bound books. She hugs each and every one, each dressed in their Sunday’s best, feathers and beads. To an outsider, it really was a family affair. Most looked the same, and similarly familiar. It goes to show its not just the glam-rocker batty-eyed stilleto-ed Too-Good-For-You’s here in LA. The place was packed full, and the line outside wrapped around the corner.

The sun sets and Devendra walks through the crowd to the stage, meeting there Adam Tullie, and Angeline Rivas. The set was fine, just fine, just three songs and a half. Two were full instrumentals, there were no lights, little volume. But you could hear a pin drop. Few were satiated, but after getting past the hurried set one realizes it’s not the music everyone was there for, it was the feeling. This was Lauren’s night.

July 17th

She’s ginger and she’s cayenne pepper, she’s creme brulee, and bubbles. Her name means “Sky” in the literal, and she’s purple, and orange. How that sultry voice can creep out of that 23 year old girl… and linger, Lord, help us.

Ceu at the Roxy was a surreal experience for both the Brazilian expatriates here in LA and the expatriates from everywhere else that live in LA. She’s quirky, smooth and sexy and her voice crosses borders across waves. She’s amazingly charming as she dances her jellyfish way out of and into each new downtempo progression.

With influences ranging from Fela Kuti to Miles Davis, from The Roots to Massive Attack, from M’shell Ndogeocello to Portishead, and Brazilian composers such as Tom Jobim, Baden-Powell, Egberto Gismonti, Ceu and her band can bust out what will make your mind wander atop some tropical rooftop overlooking some warm reality. Her refreshing sound escapes through decadent words, all in Portuguese. Ceu’s timelessness does extend over any bounds ever set. If you don’t love her music, you are not human.

“Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ‘the rat race’ is not yet final.”
—The Great Shark Hunt, 1979

I write this note in great respect today for all the expert advice HST has supplied me over my expendable course. On this day, July the 18th, 2000 and 9, the Good Doctor is alive and well in the form of crumpled and preserved words and pages that serve every purpose for us here now. The inducting of Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ‘72 into the Modern Library is upon us. Visit http://www.petitiononline.com/GONZOHST/petition.html to personally authorize its position alongside the best there is among writers and literats. Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing have already marred their way through the thick of fitful potential, let’s commemorate the fall of Nixon and any others with no faith in prophesy, today, on July the 18th, with two cheers and two bottles of absinthe, and a ratification.

“The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favour during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the acid era — but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover; a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.” Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 (1973)

Yours,
-Juanita Caruso