College Thesis Offers Different L.A. Perspective : With poetry, performance works, readings, exhibits and films, student’s work veers from the conventional paper

They don’t do senior college theses the way they used to.

In olden days, thesis meant paper--lots of it. The paper had best be filled with Academicspeak, and of course, footnotes. Many, many footnotes.

And if no one read it but your professor, and it collected dust on a library shelf, no matter. It made the grade.

One look at UCLA senior Josh Crandall, and suddenly the old days seem very old indeed. Crandall, being a ‘90s kind of guy, has decided to take on his campus, and the surrounding city, as his thesis.

He calls it Los Angeles Perspectives.

It won’t be found in a library. Instead, this festival of poetry, performance works, readings, exhibits and films (kicking off Monday and running through Friday) will take place seemingly everywhere else at UCLA--”especially in places like the cafeteria adjacent to the science buildings,” says Crandall, “where art and performing aren’t supposed to occur.”

Removing art from its typical confines of galleries and theaters is partly why director/programmer Crandall shies away from calling his thesis a “festival” and prefers the word forum, “where people can get together and talk about the ideas coming out of the work they see.”

Los Angeles Perspectives’ central idea is one of the City of the Angels as a kind of urban universe. Whether that can be contained within a university is open to question, and in fact the festival does stray off campus once, for a screening. The never-released, uncut 70mm version of “Blade Runner”--in the eyes of its considerable cult following the quintessential Los Angeles science-fiction movie--will be screened Thursday night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theatre.

“I love programming and planning big projects, even the stress. I’ll probably die young because of it,” says Crandall, 22. He laughs at a visitor’s joke that he’s trying to be a young Bill Graham, the rock concert impresario. “Even though I am a major in World Arts and Culture--it’s a relatively new major--and this is my thesis project, I’d be doing this festival even if I wasn’t” doing it for a grade.

“What I’m most interested in is bringing together a large mix of cultural traditions, see where they fit into Los Angeles, and watch how artists interpret all of this.”

The artists include poet/journalist Ruben Martinez (Wednesday evening, Kerckhoff Coffee House), painter Chris Warner (whose work will share the walls of the Kerckhoff Art Gallery with that of artists Robbie Conal and Anne Glover), performance artist Anthony Ramos (Thursday noon, Court of Sciences), nihilist performer Elisha Shapiro (Friday noon), and performance poet Julia Stein and actress Shawna Casey (on a joint bill, Monday noon). Both Shapiro and Stein/Casey will be in North Campus Room 22.

Multicultural , that perennial (and some say, overused) watchword, is a guiding notion for Los Angeles Perspectives; it’s also a term that takes on different shades of meaning when Crandall or the participating artists bring it up.

Crandall: “I jumped into this project with an assumption,” which was that Los Angeles is made up of various cultural groups. “But how do they differ? And how do they cross boundaries?”

Martinez: “This city is no longer a Protestant haven for outsiders, as it used to be, but is fusing that past with an even older, Catholic/Latin past. In a way, L.A. is being reborn by going back in time.”

Stein: “The original meaning of multicultural, when I worked on literary magazines in the ‘70s, had a working-class component to it. That has been lost.”

When asked why it has been lost, Stein’s answer reflects the complexity of Los Angeles that intrigues Crandall. “A lot of art that came out of working-class areas, such as Latino communities,” Stein notes, “went unnoticed by the larger city for decades. Now what’s being noticed is the work of just a few artists. That can be tokenism.”

This, Crandall explains, is why he and another key festival organizer and sponsor, the UCLA Student Committee for the Arts, tried to avoid stars in favor of artists not necessarily in the Los Angeles cultural freeway’s fast lane. “There’s so much physical space in the city that it can’t be completely dominated by official, Establishment art. People from alternative viewpoints can find room here and make their mark in a way that couldn’t be done in a more compact city.”

An example of this is Conal, the Venice-based agitprop maestro whose political posters regularly emblazon the walls of public spaces. The original silk screens of his new, blunt work on Police Chief Daryl Gates (titled “Casual Drug Users Ought to Be Taken Out and Beaten”) and his earlier “Men Without Lips/Women With Teeth” will be part of what amounts to a Conal retrospective.

The guerrilla approach to visual art contrasts sharply with Warner’s work, which employs familiar landscape painting techniques to focus on such traditionally “ugly” subjects as sewer outlets, constructions sites and industrial zones. Warner, 38, originally from Great Falls, Mont., finds the Los Angeles cityscape “incredibly complex. I’ve been here five years and I’m only now starting to understand it. Places like vacant lots where the original desert shows through the development around it--those fascinate me.”

The work by Stein, who teaches seminars through UCLA Extension (her next one, on April 27, is titled “How to Publish in Literary Magazines and Literary Presses”), marks a departure in two ways.

In her “Into Deepest Africa in the Hardest Way,” an example of performance poetry, she will kick aside the poet’s podium and adopt various characters and costumes to add movement to the mix. Its depiction of people desperately trying to make it in Hollywood is a change from a frequent Stein concern: America’s immigrants.

Writer Carey McWilliams “once told me that Hollywood had a double-edged quality,” Stein says. “It brought an incredible amount of talent and variety of arts to the city, while it also warped reality. I’m dealing with Hollywood’s view of Africa, not the real Africa.”

Hollywood’s warping power is also at the heart of Casey’s one-woman performance of playwright Michael Sargent’s piece, “She.” Casey, now starring in Justin Tanner’s Cast Theatre comedy, “Party Mix,” explains that her woman “has lost her soul to the tabloids. She thinks that she’s Raquel Welch, but it’s anybody’s guess who she really is.” Sargent, with whom Casey has collaborated with on such plays about darkest Tinseltown as “I Hate!” and “My Crime,” came up with the idea on the highway to Los Angeles from San Francisco. “But it changed as I worked more closely with him,” Casey said. “Sometimes, we can’t tell where his ideas end and mine begin.”

Hollywood, though, also came to Los Angeles Perspectives’ aid. Crandall, told of the uncut “Blade Runner” by a former teacher, doggedly tracked down the print via director Ridley Scott, whose blessing gave him access to the Warner Bros. preservation department. There, a reportedly pristine 70mm version--the one Scott wishes had been released but never was--sat collecting dust. Crandall says, “The print lacks credits, but it’s otherwise as it was meant to be seen.”

The movie’s vision of a Los Angeles filled with Third World culture and violence is one that Martinez, who also reports on city politics for L.A. Weekly, thinks is not far from the present. “And if we don’t watch where we’re going,” he warns, “we’ll exceed that vision.” (Two other festival movies, Monday at 7 p.m., also deal with the violence-torn inner city: Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song” and Dennis Hopper’s “Colors.”)

“At the same time,” Martinez adds, “I believe we’re rediscovering this city’s real history. The rise of the Latino community is charging that rediscovery by replenishing L.A.’s old Latino character. A chapter of Mike Davis’ new book on L.A., ‘City of Quartz,’ is titled, ‘Sunshine or Noir,’ and that perfectly sums up the place for me. You have Third World vibrancy and Third World poverty. The natural beauty of mountains and oceans and the castoff inner city. The dramatic images that seep into my poems now are all around me: the freeways, the huge crowds, the men waiting on the corner for day work, the LAPD copters casting their lights in people’s windows.”

“Hopefully,” says Crandall as he puts in 50-hour workweeks on his thesis/forum/festival, “the work and the discussions afterward will confront people with different views of where they live.”

“Los Angeles Perspectives” occurs at various sites on the UCLA campus, Monday through Friday. Information: (213) 825-6564 (gallery exhibit and evening performances); (213) 825-3253 (daytime performances). Free admission. “Blade Runner” information: (213) 825-9261; tickets: $7 students; $10 general.