Stepping out of the chaos of Santa Monica Blvd and into the New Theater to meet Calla Henkel for our interview about her latest book, Scrap, had the transportative quality of entering a portal; exiting the speedy streets and entering the hermetically sealed darkness of the cool, dark, velvet-lined theater for a different kind of vector. Side-stepping two girls in prom dresses rehearsing a cat fight, Henkel mentions she had just returned from a swim at a public pool a block away, thus explaining her swimwear. She has an incredibly disarming demeanor—a calm, collected amiability rare for Los Angeles, perhaps equal-parts informed by, and resistant of, the twelve years she spent in Berlin running TV, a smorgasbord performance space, nightlife venue and film studio with Max Pitegoff (also co-founder of the New Theater).
The New Theater is something of a nexus for the burgeoning literary scene and (stagnating) gallery-circuit of Los Angeles, buttressing each through its unique hybrid programming. And not unlike the New Theater, her latest novel Scraps is an intersection between Henkel’s understanding of narrative and lived experience within the arts. It’s a lesbian neo-noir trojan-horsing a deeper critique of the gallery system, true crime, and the underbelly of schadenfreude inherent to both. Read more.