Happy New Year!

With the radical music of Suicide to greet the New Year, he he he... This was made more than 30 years ago and it's still much fresher, experimental and cutting-edge than most music made today. Fresh, experimental, radical and cutting-edge art is everything I wish you all for 2011, along with fantastic health, great job prospects and money aplenty, love  and friendship in the same quantity.

FBC! is still in the old world this week and so will miss the openings in LA on Saturday. I haven't paid much attention from here (obviously) so there won't be any YSL post this week. I just want to signal one opening at EGHQ, I think there's one at Steve Turner as well and the series of Kamikaze shows at POST. Please refer to the above links for full information.

Among the few things FBC! is looking forward to in 2011 are the April 9 concert of the Residents in LA (location TBA), the Melvins in residence at the Echoplex every Friday in January, Swans at the El Rey on March 2 and possibly Devo at Club Nokia on March 19. Maybe if we're  lucky John Cale will finally release his long-awaited next album this year. And maybe get himself a real website and not a lame Myspace page.

Art-wise both Tad Beck and Ivan Morley are scheduled to have an opening on January 15 (at Samuel Freeman and Richard Telles respectively) while Mike Kelley has one at Gagosian on January 11th.

The obvious big art event in LA this year will be Pacific Standard Time, a series of events curated in most LA institutions about the art production of our fair city from roughly 1955 to 1980 and overseen (and funded in big part) by the Getty. Finally, Los Angeles will look at his own art history, but FBC! regrets that there isn't a corollary series of shows tackling the last 30 years since it is really then that the city took off as an art capital of the world.
Yours truly believed that the Jack Goldstein retrospective curated by Philip Kaiser was going to happen at OCMA this year after MOCA stupidly canceled it, but I find no mention of it on their website. Can anybody tell me if it's happening in 2012 instead, or if it's not happening at all? Which would be a disaster. The rest of the contemporary art programming at most LA museums looks pretty uninspiring this year, with the bright exception of the Hammer and the Paul Thek retrospective, and a small show that seems interesting coming up at the Norton Simon, about 1960s abstraction.

On a more personal level, I'm looking forward to the Mondrian retrospective currently at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and some stealth guerrilla curating I'll be doing in NYC at the end of April.