Dennis Hollingsworth

NightLife

The night ended at Mandarake when Stephanie peeled flower petals, licked and pasted them on her fingers, something she learned in elementary school. Chris followed suit and as the petals fell off, the night was over.

It was our/my first visit to Mandrake, the Culver City bar that's the social anchor for the most recent art gallery cluster in Los Angeles. Owners Flora Wegman, Drew Hetzler and Justin Beal created for Culver City what is probably the most important component of an art world: social space, a place to charlar, to talk about things made, a point where one can expose and be exposed to ideas, to push off and towards making things again. A bar, a quasi exhibition space/dance floor, a smoker's patio out back... in other words, a digestive system for ideation. The Cedar Bar in New York, Paris Bar in Berlin, the Four Cats in Barcelona, ...and (yes!) Chinatown's Hop Louie. An art world needs a top a middle and a bottom; the institutional, the strata of galleries, and the bottom -a place for what I call "knuckleheads", where everyone mixes and everything happens.

We stopped by Mandrake to shake off a diverting but all too formal evening event staged for the Fashion Industry Guild at the Beverly Wilshire Regent Hotel in Beverly Hills.

The nice thing is that this was a charity event meant to recognise the huge donations to the Cedar Sinai Hospital Neo-Natal wing. Altruism doesn't have to be exciting. The crew from Guess? performed a kind of diplomatic duty, representing the flag. Everyone performed their duty with aplomb.