Culver City — All of a Sudden

I came to Culver City all of a sudden a couple of months ago after nearly 30 years in San Diego. I was fairly well known there as an artwriter and critic. I also opened and ran contemporary art gallery for a couple of years. For a while, I hobnobbed with the greats and near greats of the local art scene.

 All of that is quite a ways back now. More recently, except for an occasional feature story written for a high-end lifestyle magazine and a couple of not quite art publications, I’ve pretty much faded from the art scene – much as the San Diego art scene faded from itself.

 Then, most recently, with all kinds of fading going on everywhere due to the recession, my few writing gigs dried up and disappeared. This was followed by my day job at a national design center. It started fitfully fading, then vanished altogether when the entire company went belly up.

 No writing gigs. No day job. I was at the end of a rope. Or the rope was at the end of me.

 In the meantime, my 91 year old mom was increasingly showing signs of her age and needing help to carry on. She lives in a small condo near Culver City which has a small and rarely used second bedroom/office. Figuring that we would be helping each other out, we agreed that I would move in. So that’s what I did a couple of months ago to find myself in L.A.

 I figured that L.A. would offer a far bigger art scene than San Diego in which to find art and galleries to write about. So I started to look around. Although nobody in San Diego had uttered much more than word about Culver City, it wasn’t long at all before I realized that I’d arrived at a spot adjacent to a gold mine of galleries within a five minute drive of where I was living – something like 20 serious galleries within a mile of each other on South La Cienega and Washington Boulevards.

Writing about all this art could keep me busy forever. Maybe get some spending money, although there was no publication clammoring for my work.

“Do a blog,” my friends said.

Okay, so I’ll do a blog.

But where to begin?