Enter Through the Gift Shop

Bennett Stein routinely expresses great enthusiasm for visiting art museums, but then the moment he arrives at said temples of high culture, he speedwalks around whatever show is on display and makes a dash for the gift shop, which often exhibits a high level of curation. In this excerpt from this DnA newsletter, he expounds on three of his favorites in LA.

Healing Power at The LA Phil

This joint, nestled right there in the bosom of Disney Concert Hall, is so mad groovy, it lifts you gently up a foot off the ground. First off, you walk in and there spinning on their vinyl HiFi phonograph is Charles Mingus breathing new life into Duke Ellington compositions. And suddenly, you are transfixed by a wall of every single symphony orchestra instrument shrunk down to Christmas tree ornaments (above). The detailing on the bassoon, the size of a Bic Pen, put a spell on me. I had to touch it 15 times: the dark wood of the fussilage, the silver keys, the black and brass trim. I dream of that bassoon playing Peter and the Wolf in my soul. The miniature cello, have mercy. 

They have, for cryin' out loud, a Post Malone Xmas tree ornament with his ridiculously over-tattooed kisser. As well as Bowie, Willie Nelson, and Bach and Mozart Christmas tree ornaments. Then this fab gift shop has loads of rather hipfully, tastily curated classical and jazz vinyl and CD action, and endlessly cool books on music on the much taboo subject of how really, truly, the only medically feasible pharmaceutical a sick puppy (like me) could ever really need is all genre types of music. So flush all your dope and pills down the toilette and rush out to this heavenly methadone clinic disguised as a smart, well-rounded, multi-cultural, music-centered healing emporium.

Dressing the Art Army at The Broad 

This gift shop has really gotten its act together. It has very craftily taken the old tropes like Warhol's Brillo Pad box or Velvet Underground banana riff and turned them into cool patches, stickers, bookmarks, decks of cards, and hoodies. I was just there on Saturday. How was I supposed to NOT get a coaster that says, "MUSEUM NERD" in the coolest neo-psych-jazz font and coloration ever? Honestly, how was I NOT supposed to nab one of their enamel pins that riffs off the artist Patrick Martinez' work? In this case, a pin with just two simple words that got right under my skin. The words? "COLOR ALLOWED," a most excellent pushback on the whole Jim Crow signage everywhere for decades all over the American South. Oh, and I really, really, really wanted the Jeff Koons balloon puppy speaker system. I did not get it because it's a tad pricey, it'll set ya back 750 Yankee dollars. I still want one, though.

The Broad also has most excellently done T-shirts reflecting the newly opened Robert Therrien show. I really wanted to grab the T depicting one of his giant card table folding chair sculptures, it was olive green and felt like if you put it on, it made you a soldier of the arts. I always dreamed of being in the art army that might one day declare victory for humankind.

Sensory Seduction at Craft Contemporary

This is veritable labyrinth of wonderment. First, you are lured in by rich reds, yellows, oranges, and cobalt blue of various indigenously crafted scarves, shawls, headbands, and cowbell straps. You're instantly transported to the Andes, or do I mean Tibet, or do I mean an Arctic circle Lapland worship gathering to honor the reindeer god? None of the offerings ever feels mass-produced or trite or commodified to within an inch of its shelf life. Everything they put on offer... you simply have to touch, hold, gauge the weight of, and plot to acquire. This is a gift shop by seduction of all five senses. And there are several smart sciency items too that test to see if your brain even still works, or God forbid, still thinks about stuff, or about anything, about meaning or purpose. Go here soon, if you dare.

While there, check out Material Curiosity, the new show juxtaposing colorful mosaics, textiles, carved wood panels, wall hangings, ceramics, and more, by Jerome and Evelyn Ackerman with complementary works by three contemporary artists, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Jolie Ngo, and Vince Skelly.

Ozzy Osbourne, My Medieval Alchemist Gothic High Priest, and How He Seduced Me Into the World of Gothic Architecture

 

John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne, Rock & Roll's "Prince of Darkness" and reality TV's family man, died on July 22, 2025,  at age 76. 

Bennett Stein pays tribute.

I was an 11-year old NYC rocker kid when I first got dosed by the epic dungeon rock of Black Sabbath. The very first track on their very first eponymously titled LP, “Black Sabbath,” starts with lush rain, boomy thunder. A cathedral bell tolls like a funeral, a funeral for what must die, what must be laid to rest: my innocence, my virginity, the racist prigs in my 3rd grade class at P.S. 109 in Spanish Harlem. Ozzy became my priest, leading the funeral march for all that sucks and tries to push you around. Thank you, Archbishop Ozzy for wanding away the cobwebs of my American Idiocy, and the mold of malice and menace in the life of conformity packaged as the “American Dream.” Thank you, holy father Wizard of Ozzy for baptizing me in your hard metallic liturgy. Sure, Led Zeppelin were bitchin’ but never deep, never authoritatively spiritual like Black Sabbath, who so deftly repurposed the Eucharist of the holy church. Black Sabbath made notions of church feel potent, healing. Ozzy saves souls, I could feel it. The Bells of Ozzy toll. 

Holy Epiphany, what the holy moly could this be all about? I always knew British Invasion rock was of much sturdier, more studly calibre: Yardbirds, Stones, Cream, Queen, Fab 4, Pretty Things, Bowie, Hendrix. But none of these great bands got near what Ozzy did. Minute :37 of that first track “Black Sabbath,” power chord lick cleared the fog and mist like a Holy Grail Knight on a Samurai stallion – sitting right there in my living room. Ozzy intones on some demon with “eyes of fire,” imploring God to assist in keeping at bay the sulphur-breathed one. I grab the album cover: it’s a monk or nun out front of a "monastery" in the dead of winter, obviously in 1300s Northern England. Inside the album cover, pics of Monseigneur Ozzy and Guitar-Lord Tonyi Iommi, huge brass crosses on chains hung over their dark hearts. Wow.

I grab off the bookshelf my mom’s book on the Gothic Cathedrals of England and France; there are full-page color photographs of Wells and Chartres Cathedrals, Notre Dame--and right there I realize Ozzy is the alchemist who built the Gothic cathedrals. Heck, there are statues of him in every other nook of Notre Dame. Sure, they’re saints and popes and all, but Ozzy was always decked out just like those Gothic statues in priestly robes, draped in crosses, wielding staffs and lances. I kept turning the pages on towering, mystical Gothic architecture and suddenly heard the wicked fast licks of “Wicked World.” Long-haired Ozzy’s songs roll like sermons and blessings or cursings at high mass. 

Forty years later, I’ve visited nearly every Gothic Cathedral in France and half the ones in the UK. The interiors of Gothic Cathedrals are portals to metaphysical wonderment; just stroll one of these 12th/13th century structure’s interior side aisles; look up and behold the quadripartite rib vaults. They fan out like lush, deciduous, forest canopy, dancing elm leaves in breezes that blow you along and transport you to concertos of bird song. Squint a tad and there’s a fair maid on horseback, pulling back her bow, her arrow aimed at your heart. You spy Monarch butterflies, sprites, elves, centaurs, oh, yes, and far in the distance a dragon running fire scales, from cigarette lighter to Roman Candle. 

On the exterior the flying buttresses spin like eternities of Proud Mary’s steamboat wheel, rollin’ on the river by the back roads of your memory that keeps you ever gentle on my mind. These are jazz themes and choruses in carved stone, every arch and pinnacle morphing, gyrating, crunking. The gargoyles, those fright-faced reptilian freaks that spit and hiss and go boo - it turns out they guard the temple and keep the devil on a leash, housetrained, ready to play fetch. I visited France’s Mont-Saint-Michel, the monastery named for a scaly demon-slaying Saint, out in the English Channel. It looks to be floating atop the waves at high tide. As far as I’m concerned, that's Ozzy’s parish right there. 

Thanks to Ozzy, I’ve read most of the High Gothic novels: Frankenstein, Dracula, Picture Of Dorian Gray, works of de Sade, and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk, where the tormented sex addict Abbot Ambrosio’s love squeeze is, yes, androgynous, but who turns out to be, yes, a woman who is yet disguised as a man who is yet, in fact, the Prince of Darkness himself (herself?). 

So it’s all thanks to Ozzy, my own personal confessor-professor-inquisitor who lured me into the world of all things Gothic: Architecture, Literature, the poets Blake, Coleridge, Baudelaire and, oh, you guessed it, yup, I’m still trying to vaseline out the black coal eye make-up from last Halloween. Thank you, Ozzy, forever the hallucinatory high Goth priest metaphorical drug doser of my heart, my soul and my overactive imagination.

Images, from top: Black Sabbath, first album, designed by Keith Macmillan; Notre Dame (photo by Robin Bennett Stein), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, features heaven and hell, designed by Ernie Cefalu and illustrator Drew Struzan; Wells Cathedral x 2 (photos by Robin Bennett Stein); Ozzy Osbourne being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 2024 (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.)

Author note: Robin Bennett Stein is partner in life and work of Frances Anderton. He is a musician-writer-filmaker-DJ-guitar teacher who periodically muses on culture under the nom de plume The Good4NothingConnoisseur.