When I pulled up in front of the house, Danny Fox was standing on the front porch, the Sunday newspaper spread out in front of him. The plan is to wander downtown and check out his new show, “The Rain It Raineth Every Day,” which opens Friday at Chinatown Taylor’s, the — you guessed it — Chinatown gallery founded by the Los Angeles Visual Poet Laureate , which is incomparable and unstoppable. Henry Fox, 38, and Henry go back nearly a decade; They first bumped into each other in 2015 at a bar across the street from Danny’s studio in London, when Henry, 66, was in town during a residency at the White Chapel Gallery. When Taylor asked what kind of magic followed that fateful night, He said: “I don’t know – we played ping-pong and maybe made a shot!” Fox adds more color: “Henry called me the next day and asked if I could find him some stamps.”
I first met Danny Fox in 2016 through our mutual friend, artist Wes Lange. By the end of the comment period, he asked me if I wanted to write something for an exhibition he was having at Sotheby’s; Soon after, we reconvened at his studio in downtown Los Angeles, a stone’s throw from the Nickel Diner, the sad, now-defunct home of bacon-and-maple glazed donuts. After that, we would meet up from time to time, often at the Clark Street Diner, near Bronson Canyon, where we lived together at the time. However, one of my favorite encounters ever was actually not just a meeting. I was in the Arts District of Los Angeles, having a few minutes to myself on the 4th Street Bridge, staring at the muddy L.A. Riverbed, when I saw Danny walking down Santa Fe Boulevard, all alone and singing at the top of his lungs. .
“Henry’s wearing a shirt or something,” Fox said as I approached the balcony. Unlike Fox on the aforementioned downtown L.A. day, Taylor can be heard inside the house, singing something completely indistinguishable but definitively punctuated by a pair of “Yah Mahn’s!” After a quick reunion at the dining room table, we hopped into our various vehicles and headed to Los Angeles’ Chinatown, the geographic double of every abandoned theme park introduced in the original Scooby Doo cartoon.
