hollywood apocalypse

I'm in debt to Skylight Books for sending me an e-mail about the Hollywood Apocalypse event at Black Maria Gallery this Saturday. Somehow, I had missed the LA Times write-up. Writer-artist Ray Zone organized a "competitive invitational" for artists to submit their rendition of the painting "The Burning of Los Angeles" from Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. Here is how it is described in the novel:

Across the top, parallel with the frame, he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. For the face of its members, he was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die; the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers -- all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super “Dr. Know-All Pierce-All” had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.