• Hooray For Hollywood! The Academy Museum Has Opened

    As anyone who has worked in Hollywood knows, it's a miracle when anything gets done. For each movie made, each series shown, there are thousands that didn"t; and no production journey is complete without having to jump through more hoops and face more setbacks (and studio notes) than imaginable. So, too, with the Academy Museum.More than 90 years ago, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the folks who bring you the Oscars) thought it would be…

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  • Everything Rises For Jennifer Koh And Davone Tines

    Last night, I attended a performance, Everything Rises at Royce Hall presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (CAP UCLA), co-created and featuring Grammy-winning classical violinist Jennifer Koh and Bass-Baritone Davóne Tines with music by Ken Ueno. It had premiered the night before at the University of California at Santa Barbara's St. Anthony's Chapel.Everything Rises is a work of such originality and, at the same time, a so deeply personal exploration of identity by both... View…

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  • "Hadestown" Marks A Return To Los Angeles

    Hadestown, the many-Tony-award-winning musical, which retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (and Hades and Persephone) in a modern-day New Orleans-like setting (with some steampunk flourishes), has arrived in LA, at the Ahmanson through May 29, 2022 (and then again at the Segerstrom Center for The Arts in Costa Mesa, CA, August 9 to 21).Hadestown has much to recommend it, and if the crowd the night I attended is any indicator, it has a great appeal to a young and…

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  • San Diego's Photo Gem

    Although San Diego is less than three hours south of where I live, I visit there less than I would have imagined, mostly for lack of reasons to do so.However, a recent invitation to visit the Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA) in Balboa Park in San Diego introduced me to a gem I had not appreciated before.First, a few words about the Museum. The Museum grew out of a local group of photography enthusiasts who, beginning in 1972, operated the…

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  • Of Arms, The Man And The Metaverse

    Arma Virumque Cano, I sing of arms and the man. Thus begins the first line of Virgil's epic Latin poem, The Aeneid, which came to mind as I sat down to write about one of the most fascinating and extraordinary experiences I"ve recently had.Late one afternoon, I found myself in Downtown LA, standing in a large high-ceilinged room surrounded by a selection of rare items from the largest private collection of arms and armor that holds, according to its owners,…

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  • Comic Tom Segura Books Funny

    The other night Natasha, my adult-ish daughter, asked me to accompany her to a book author event for standup comic and podcaster Tom Segura's best-selling "I"d like to Play Alone, Please" (Grand Central Publishing), a comic she is a fan of and whom she thought I would enjoy. It would take me too long to unpack all the dissonance and significance in that first sentence but suffice to say that this was so rare an event in every respect that…

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  • Wynton Marsalis And Georgian-American Friendship Makes Hamptons Swing

    On a recent Saturday night, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra performed at the Southampton Arts Center as part of the Hamptons Jazz Fest to celebrate 30 years of Independence for the Republic of Georgia and to honor thirty years of Georgian-American friendship; and, like all things Georgian and all things Wynton, it exceeded all expectations.There were speeches by Joe Diamond, General Manager of the Southampton Arts Center and Claes Brondal, co-founder of the Hamptons ... View…

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  • Take Me To Church

    As a general rule, great or interesting art and exhibitions are not found in summer resorts, the art buying and appreciating public being transient, the season short, and the major galleries in urban art centers (New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Hong Kong) being proprietary about their artists and their collectors. However, that may be changing as what were once one season destinations are becoming year-round bases for work-from-home.A case in point is Sag Harbor's new artist-focused ce... View Original…

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  • The Full Picture: Black Cinema 1898-1971

    Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971, the new exhibition currently on view at Los Angeles" Academy Museum is a revelation, an education, a corrective to our blindered knowledge of American Film history and a lot of fun. It is superbly researched and curated with a wealth of artifacts intelligently installed and displayed, and really makes the case (if it even needed to be made) that the Academy has indeed launched a museum rather than merely a tourist attraction.At the press preview, Academy...…

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  • Cy Twombly At The Getty: Where The Past Is Present

    When we look at abstract art, we tend to see in it a spontaneous investigation of a self-made universe untethered from the past. We decipher the works by the emotion they produce, the feelings they conjure, the intelligence we imagine informing the patterns, lines, movement, motion, color, and negative space and how they all interact on the canvas. The sum total leads us to see a work as art and not merely decoration or, for that matter, child's play.Cy Twombly:…

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  • Here It Is: Larry Klein's Tribute To Leonard Cohen

    Leonard Cohen who died in 2016, has since been memorialized by several tribute concerts, including ones led by his son Adam Cohen in Cohen's native Montreal and in Sweden led by the duo First Aid Kit (sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg) and their friends. There have been touring museum exhibitions, and post-humous books of fiction and poetry, and documentaries about Leonard and Marianne, and about Cohen's song Hallelujah.Leonard Cohen was an old soul. Among the cultural fixtures of the Sixt...…

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  • Dallas Contemporary Looks Backward Forward With Shepard Fairey

    Although Shepard Fairey is a Los Angeles-based artist, and I am a Los Angeles-based journalist, last month I traveled to Dallas, Texas, to attend the Dallas Contemporary (DC) annual gala and to see backward forward, Fairey's exhibition of his new work, on view at DC through July 23, 2022 – all of which was very much worth the trip.Dallas Contemporary is housed in a renovated 37,000 square foot industrial building in the Dallas Design District.DC is a non-collecting art institution,…

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