Girl Guerrillas in Our Midst

Hi, girls. It’s a bummer, but true, that you must suffer for beauty.

We don’t mean by going under the knife or even by putting your bank account under the knife at the cosmetics counter. We’re talking not about a woman’s countenance but that other great canvas--which is a great canvas, or art, to use the technical term.

The Guerrilla Girls are back being unbeautiful and rapping civilization’s knuckles for ignoring so many women who create beauty--women artists. That is, artists who happen to be women. (“They don’t call Rembrandt or Van Gogh ‘male artists,’ ” note the Girls. So there.)

And, hey, it’s tough work being a Guerrilla Girl, but someone’s got to do it. You think it’s easy running around in a hot, sweaty gorilla mask and plastering art hot spots with funny protest posters? You think it’s any way to be one of the popular girls?

“Dear group of communists,” starts one piece of anti-fan mail addressed to the girls. “You’re the strongest bunch of bitches ganged together I’ve ever seen in world of art. . . . Best work of art a woman or girl can make is in bed making well love and sometimes procreate nonidiot females.”

Oh, yes. Did we mention that that letter was signed by an Italian art critic? Presumably a nonidiot art critic, but we refuse to commit.

Anyway, a few Girls swung by UCLA’s Book Zone recently to tout their new book, “The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art” (Penguin Books). Consider it a supplement to H.W. Janson’s “History of [Mostly Male] Art.”

It starts with do’s and don’ts for women in Greece and Rome, and quotes know-it-alls like that nutty Aristotle: “It is absurd to argue from an analogy with wild animals and say that men and women ought to engage in the same occupations, for animals do not do housework.”

Neither do columnists. Ask anyone.

The Girls bring us up to modern day, sketching undersung artists along the way. There’s Hildegard Von Bingen, a Benedictine abbess whose independent-mindedness prompted church authorities to place her under house arrest in the 12th century. (By the way, Von Bingen’s sacred music began burning up the charts a couple of years ago. Does a girl have to wait eight centuries to get some respect?)

There’s also Claude Cahun, the cross-dressing lesbian Jewish Marxist who wasn’t one of the popular girls in occupied France for some reason but managed to escape the Nazis’ clutches. And many more.

Even our local aesthetes didn’t escape the sting of Girl Consciousness. In the book, they note: “In T.J. Clark’s ‘groundbreaking’ work on Impressionism, ‘The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers’ (1984), no mention is made of Mary Cassatt, but 30 pages are devoted to prostitutes and courtesans.”

“Timothy Clark used to teach here,” piped up a Guerrilla fan in the UCLA audience.

Grrrowlll.

The New York-based Girls (they won’t say how many of them there are) have been doing the guerrilla thing since 1985, and they figure that if they haven’t battered down the art world’s door, they’ve at least pushed it ajar.

Said the Girl who calls herself Frida Kahlo, “We made it fashionable to complain.” And in our book, thumbs up to anything that elevates our favorite activity to an art.

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L.A. Confident: Ah, for memories of our early education at a small, cranky newspaper. Our hard-knocks professor was a pint-sized Lou Grant growl-alike, an editor who impressed upon us this important first lesson, which he typed on an actual typewriter (And no, we aren’t 100 years old.):

BAD NEWS IS GOOD NEWS.

LARRY.

Chances are that the veteran Washington Post newsman Lou Cannon would not put it quite that way, but Los Angeles does offer that certain je ne sais quoi for journalists who subscribe to Larry’s philosophy.

“I get asked more in Washington,” Cannon was saying, “the gist of the question is, Was it a comedown to leave Washington? And I said, ‘What’s important in this country is happening on the streets and cities. I covered the White House. I like covering L.A. better, because this is our future. If we can get along here--the Rodney King question--then we’re going to succeed as a society.’ ”

Of course, trying to get along has had its moments, as Angelenos well know. So do readers of Cannon’s praised new tome, “Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD” (Times Books).

“This was by far the hardest book I’ve ever had to do because it’s complicated. We have real, real problems in the cities. We have real racial problems. We have real police problems. We have real problems of governance. But I’m optimistic. I think L.A. is one of the very best places in the world to be. I really believe that.”

It certainly was the best place for the Santa Barbara-based Cannon to be last week, when his six pages of acknowledgments sprang to life at a Ladera Heights book party. There were bevies of politicians, police officers and journalists, among them Warren Christopher, ACLU chief Ramona Ripston, city Councilwoman Laura Chick, county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, acquitted officer Tim Wind and Congressman Julian Dixon.

“Thank you for every time I called you, you have always called me back,” said the courtly Cannon to the congressman.

“The last time I talked to you, you were trying to get some tires for the car,” Dixon replied.

Hey, it’s the public’s right to know.

Former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Meyers was also there with new husband Todd Purdum of the New York Times. OK, so we couldn’t resist. Anything on the Monica meter?

“No matter if she’s just walking from the house to the car, the hair’s done, the makeup’s done, she’s got her hair held up, the hair’s bouncing, she’s not quitting,” observed Meyers. “She’s not crawling into a hole. I give her credit for that. She’s got to live her life.”

Meanwhile, we sat at Cannon’s feet for our continuing journalistic education. “If any author tells you he doesn’t like to sign his books,” Cannon said in the midst of liking and signing, “be suspect of anything else he tells you.”

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SF Filmmaker Seeks . . .: As we chow down on leftover chocolate in honor of our post-Valentine’s Day bliss, we bring you one more love story for the road. It belongs to indie filmmaker Julie Davis, who figuratively sings the single-girl blues in “I Love You . . . Don’t Touch Me,” which opens Friday in L.A. and New York.

At 28, Davis had never had what you’d call an actual boyfriend. Then seven months ago, she reported to Orion Pictures, which was handling the film, where she met the juicy Scott Mandell, head of post-production.

“A nice Jewish boy,” Davis says. “From the moment I walked into the office, that was it.”

The moral of this story is, if you’re looking for a man, just make a film!

“The film was very personal,” Davis says, “and I always hoped it would connect with somebody. I always felt that making this movie was the most expensive personal ad I could place.”

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Hunkering Down: It’s official. David Boreanaz of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Mekhi Phifer of “Soul Food” and Devon Sawa of “Casper” are not merely three of “the 50 hottest guys under the sun,” according to YM magazine. They’re the cover hunks for the March “special swimsuit issue.”

“That’s what they say,” says Sawa, “but it’s kind of a cheesy word so we’re just going to say male whatever. It’s all good.”

Sorry. He’s one of the 50 hottest male whatevers, a bunch of whom were drinking whatever at the Sky Bar last week to celebrate the issue and their general hunkiness. When Sawa isn’t spending time being a male whatever, he acts, and he just finished filming “A Cool Dry Place” for Fox with senior hunk Vince Vaughn.

“He’s training me. How to be the money. How to pick up the beautiful babies.”

No one ever said being a hunk was easy.

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Pet Project: The way to an art collector’s heart is through his pet.

Ask “Murphy Brown” producer Diane English, whose horse of different colors is staring back at you from these pages just about now. Or TV producer Doug Cramer, who hired West Hollywood artist Beau Bradford to immortalize his three King Charles spaniels. Bradford copied one of Cramer’s Roy Lichtenstein paintings and then added Elizabeth, Edward and Andrew at Cramer’s request.

“He was able to get Roy Lichtenstein’s permission to do that,” Bradford says. “Roy wrote back and described it as being radical.”

Bradford will pop your pet into copies of any famous artist’s work, but his trademark is faux Warhol silk-screens.

“I used to hang out with him at the Factory quite a bit in New York,” Bradford says. “I learned by watching exactly how he photographed people.”

Come to think of it, English’s horse does look rather Marilyn Monroe-like.

Bradford isn’t just the portraitist to the jet pet set. He also Warholizes the stars, such as the painterly Arnold and Meryl. You can see his work in the windows of the Sporting Club in West Hollywood and Blueprint in L.A.