After ten years, the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s Incognito benefit has become a fixture on the L.A. art world calendar; and although I don’t necessarily make it every year (the never-ending battle of time and distances, to say nothing of travel contingencies), I’m...
Paris Photo is in town; and although there are rumors afoot that it will be the last edition of the fair to be exported to Los Angeles, Deborah Vankin reports today in the Los Angeles Times that it will be back in 2015, to be paired alongside the French art fair, FIAC...
The 60th anniversary tour of the Paul Taylor Dance Company has provided an occasion for the revisitation or revival of a number of classic Taylor dances. I was just tempted to call them ballets; and the first of those programmed for Friday evenings performances,...
Before I was a child of Hollywood, the place, I was a child of Hollywood, the dream factory and its ancillary cultural machinery. That meant the movies first and foremost, whether experienced on the big screen at Radio City Music Hall or theatres and movie houses...
I had serious work to do, so I took a nap. After dragging it out for as long as possible, I rolled off the sofa and quickly went out, greatly in need of some revivifying fresh air, or air as fresh as it gets around here. Ten minutes later I walked into what passes for...
How will the end of the world play out? With a bang or a whimper? With mournful lamentation or furious dies irae? Vengeful and wrath-laden or becalmed? In paroxysms of grief or a hemorrhage of hilarity and hysteria? Well of course it will be all of these...
I wasn’t even sure I would be admitted to the room where most of the performance took place. There was a small throng gathered in the courtyard. Another part of the audience was already assembling in the Billy Wilder Theatre, where the performance would be...
From its troubled (I almost want to say stuttering) conception and creation, through its earliest publication – barely stitched together, edited, revised, corrected, re-edited – Melville’s Billy Budd is steeped in ambiguity – ambiguities integral to the dramatic and...
Was that a review I just read or did the snooze alarm go off again? The way they box up the art reviews in the Los Angeles Times, it’s sometimes hard to tell. The reviewer, Sharon Mizota’s focus seems to be on formula – which is not inappropriate here: the subject...
Painting is like the proverbial zombie. It’s supposed to be dead but it won’t lie down. The last 50 years in British art has been something of a paint-splattered war zone. Against the odds of prevailing abstraction, Pop and Conceptualism, painters such as Francis...
Powerhouse Brooke Garber Neidich, scion of legendary Chicago jeweler Sidney Garber, inherited her father’s business in 2008, and most recently made a splash with the jeweled silver swallows Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen sent down the runway with The Row’s Fall 2013...
Now that musicals are getting popular again, it’s a good time to revisit the work of Jacques Demy. Although he is considered part of the French new wave, most of his work owes more to Hollywood musicals and live-action fairy-tale films. His first musical (The...
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the weird inversions of mainstream and underground culture, particularly as regards formats—the vinyl record for example. Talking with Rick and Joe Potts and Dennis Duck (all founding members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society) on...
Where are the drag queens (or kings, jacks, and aces of spades or 3’s of clubs, for that matter) of yesteryear? Or simply the troupes of maskers and performers and club personalities one might see at punk and post-punk nightclubs and discotheques, underground clubs...
[Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles, February 24, 2013] ‘The best defense,’ as the old saying in legal and sporting circles goes, ‘is a good offense.’ John Waters, film director, artist, entertainer, theatrical impresario, and art connoisseur, goes better than that by...
SandylandIt put me in a great mood (once I got past the shock of a $12(!) charge at the adjacent UCLA parking structure) going into Sandra Bernhard’s show at Royce Hall. Girls night out; (boys, too). Homecoming. Lots of anniversaries among that crowd over the last...
I was sitting in my car when I heard that Lou Reed had died. The announcer went on to say that although Reed was not as famous as the Beatles or the Eagles, blah, blah—I almost rear end the car in front of me. Not as famous as the milquetoast-I-Wanna-Hold-Your-Hand...
In 1968, Beatle Paul McCartney approached Richard Hamilton, inventor of Pop Art, to design the cover for the follow-up LP to the game-changing Sgt. Pepper album of the previous year. Hamilton came up with a typically droll and elegant solution by taking the opposite...