Jack Goldstein

Jack Goldstein, an influential artist who explored the spectacular beauty and terrifying emptiness of modern life in performances, films and paintings during the 1970s and '80s, died Friday at his home in San Bernardino. He was 57. Goldstein had stopped making art in 1990 and suffered from chronic depression in recent years. He committed suicide, said Brian Butler, a Los Angeles dealer who represented him and presented a survey of his early work in 2001.

* Drug giant Merck & Co should have pulled its Vioxx painkiller from the market four years ago because data showing that it raised the risk of heart attacks has existed since 2000, Swiss scientists said. In a report for British medical journal the Lancet, researchers at the University of Bern said there was substantial evidence of the dangerous side effects of the drug by the end of 2000, but the data were not analyzed properly. * * Chiron Corp.

Just inside the front door of the Luckman Gallery at Cal State L.A. hangs a painting made of three big masonite panels covered with jet black enamel. Each contains a small, realistically rendered astronaut. With no mother ship in sight, and with oxygen tubes dangling from their hermetically sealed suits like severed umbilical cords, the lost spacemen are utterly alone, completely detached from anything that might bring them back to terra firma.

When Jack Goldstein hanged himself last March, his death was both predictable and surprising to his family and friends. The painter, who had been an influential student at CalArts and a star of the New York art scene in the 1980s, was known to be struggling with addictions to drugs and alcohol.

When Jack Goldstein hanged himself last March, his death was both predictable and surprising to his family and friends. The painter, who had been an influential student at CalArts and a star of the New York art scene in the 1980s, was known to be struggling with addictions to drugs and alcohol.

Regarding the story (Nov. 6) about Jack Goldstein, owner of Jack's Bar in Boyle Heights, please relay my commendation to Times staff writer David Freed. Freed very accurately captured the essence of what Jack's Bar was all about, and provided an excellent profile of Jack Goldstein himself. It was an entertaining and flavorful story about a colorful person and place. I know a little bit about Jack's Bar, having spent seven years at Hollenbeck Station. And not once during that time did I ever sip a Perrier in a fern bar--not while Jack's was still open.

* Drug giant Merck & Co should have pulled its Vioxx painkiller from the market four years ago because data showing that it raised the risk of heart attacks has existed since 2000, Swiss scientists said. In a report for British medical journal the Lancet, researchers at the University of Bern said there was substantial evidence of the dangerous side effects of the drug by the end of 2000, but the data were not analyzed properly. * * Chiron Corp.

For a generation of Los Angeles police officers who worked the Hollenbeck Division in Boyle Heights, Jack's Cocktails was the after-work oasis and Jack Goldstein was its sultan of suds. It was in his murky, Naugahyde dive across from the station house where the cops celebrated their promotions, grieved their fallen brothers and traded stories of the street.

A few weeks ago, I visited Rachel Kushner in her Angelino Heights home to talk about her second novel, “The Flamethrowers.” Taking place in lower Manhattan and Italy in the late 1970s, “The Flamethrowers” is an inquiry into art, politics and identity, set against a pair of landscapes defined by turmoil. Kushner is smart and deeply thoughtful; her reflections on the book, and the issues it raises, appear in this Sunday's Arts & Books . Here is more of our conversation.

Rachel Kushner's house in Angelino Heights feels about a million miles - and a million years - from the tumult embodied in her novels. There are books on shelves and stacks of children's games; in one corner, a music stand holds a beginner's songbook for guitar. And yet, even on a quiet afternoon in early spring, one finds traces, echoes of the broader world. Perhaps most prominent is the large framed map of Cuba, the setting for Kushner's first book, "Telex from Cuba," a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

Jack Goldstein, an influential artist who explored the spectacular beauty and terrifying emptiness of modern life in performances, films and paintings during the 1970s and '80s, died Friday at his home in San Bernardino. He was 57. Goldstein had stopped making art in 1990 and suffered from chronic depression in recent years. He committed suicide, said Brian Butler, a Los Angeles dealer who represented him and presented a survey of his early work in 2001.

Just inside the front door of the Luckman Gallery at Cal State L.A. hangs a painting made of three big masonite panels covered with jet black enamel. Each contains a small, realistically rendered astronaut. With no mother ship in sight, and with oxygen tubes dangling from their hermetically sealed suits like severed umbilical cords, the lost spacemen are utterly alone, completely detached from anything that might bring them back to terra firma.

Regarding the story (Nov. 6) about Jack Goldstein, owner of Jack's Bar in Boyle Heights, please relay my commendation to Times staff writer David Freed. Freed very accurately captured the essence of what Jack's Bar was all about, and provided an excellent profile of Jack Goldstein himself. It was an entertaining and flavorful story about a colorful person and place. I know a little bit about Jack's Bar, having spent seven years at Hollenbeck Station. And not once during that time did I ever sip a Perrier in a fern bar--not while Jack's was still open.

For a generation of Los Angeles police officers who worked the Hollenbeck Division in Boyle Heights, Jack's Cocktails was the after-work oasis and Jack Goldstein was its sultan of suds. It was in his murky, Naugahyde dive across from the station house where the cops celebrated their promotions, grieved their fallen brothers and traded stories of the street.

The scientific discovery that the universe is continuing to "bang" outward gives artists the fits just like every other mortal who senses his own demise as more than just an abstraction. "Unstable Universe," a current group show, addresses that abstraction and gives it a vivid pictorial grounding. The exhibit uses paintings by several artists to create a kind of cosmic womb-to-tomb experience. To walk around the gallery is to snatch a series of ideas that leap time and space in carefully choreographed rapid bounds.