How does the new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Pavilion fit into the LACMA family? Surely you must remember the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito movie “Twins.” I will not go so far as to suggest that this is what the worldly architect Renzo Piano had in mind when he designed the Resnick Pavilion at LACMA and placed it right next to his other contribution to “the campus:” the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. The resulting effect, however, is not far off. As viewed from the Entrance Pavilion, the Resnik Pavilion looks like the less-developed sibling of the taller, more imposing BCAM. It’s, well, the grand Piáno and the baby Piáno (insert restrained, WASPY laugh here). Both buildings are topped by a saw-tooth roof, are constructed from the same pale travertene marble, and are embellished with this or that functional accent in fire engine-… sorry, “Renzo-Red:” a staircase (BCAM) or an air-duct (the Resnik).But these are just surface details. As LACMA CEO and director Micheal Govan assurs us, the Resnik Pavillion is nothing but grand when viewed from the inside.

I was excited when I heard about the novel A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I’m kind of a sucker for any fiction that employs a rock and roll setting, and I stopped everything to read it.

From the blurbs I’d found online, I hadn’t expected Goon Squad to have such a complex rock and roll backdrop–I thought only one of its characters worked in the music business–but most of its characters are at least tenuously attached to life in the biz. The novel is filled with producers, record company folks, washed-up musicians, publicity people, fans. I love it when a novelist takes on this much of the rock and roll world.

We were gone for two weeks over Easter break.  Two weeks, three places.  South, farther south and gloriously hot.  As always, when we weren’t moving we knew we’d be consuming stories in the form of books.  What to bring?

It occurred to me, before setting out, that I “owed” a few people a read.  For one thing, there was Brad Listi, who encouraged me to publish an entire novel — Cadaver Blues — online, serially, on the website he conjured out of thin air.  Like a lot of things one conjures out of thin air, the site took on a life of its own, but Brad continued to encourage.  I should return the favor, I thought, by buying and reading his book.

I am not cool.