-
Tell the Damn Truth! A Conversation with Peter Guralnick
PETER GURALNICK is the author of Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home, about the great artists at the heart of American Roots Music; the two-part biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love; as well as Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, and Searching for Robert Johnson. He has written the scripts for documentaries about Sam Phillips, Sam Cooke, and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. He was in Los… -
The Israel Museum @ 50: Treasures & Exhibits
Happy birthday to the Israel Museum! The country's national museum turns 50 this year -- middle age for most of us, but quite young in museum years. The museum is celebrating the occasion with a year of special exhibits, loans and gifts, adding to its encyclopedic collection covering Middle East archaeology, Jewish life, and modern and contemporary art. The Israel Museum sits on a 20-acre campus in Jerusalem not far from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Givat Ram Campus, the… -
Heaven is a Library (The National Library of Israel)
On my most recent visit to Jerusalem this past June, I spent a few hours in heaven: touring the collections of the National Library of Israel and previewing plans for its new state-of-the-art building to be built on a beautiful site near the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the Israel Museum. Reimagining the library for the 21st Century and beyond -- the new building should be completed by 2019 and in full use by 2020 -- has been a herculean… -
The Broad's Veiled Gift to LA
Everything about visiting The Broad, the new museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles that Eli and Edythe Broad built to house their contemporary art collection, is better than expected, better than a drive-by of the exterior leads you to believe, better than photos would have you think. Yes, there are plenty of reasons to criticize The Broad, which opened Sept. 20 across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, but those pale before the very enjoyable visitor… -
A Hungarian Lens on Photography
A portrait of Picasso. Photos by Ervin Marton Courtesy Stephen Cohen Gallery “It is not enough to have talent,” photographer Robert Capa once said, turning an old saying on its head. “You also have to be Hungarian.” By which he meant Hungarian-Jewish. This point is reinforced in an exhibition of post-World War II Paris photographs by Ervin Marton at the Stephen Cohen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard. The contributions of Hungarian Jews to photography is mind-boggling: Legendary war photographer Robert Capa… -
The Liar: the Four Personas of Adolf Eichmann
Published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: The following essay/book review was just published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/liar-four-personas-adolf-eichmann The Liar: The Four Personas of Adolf Eichmann April 19, 2015 By Tom Teicholz Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer By Bettina Stangneth (Knopf). LIKE A FOSSIL preserved in amber, Adolf Eichmann has become fixed in popular memory as “The Man in the Glass Booth,” the Nazi kidnapped in Argentina to stand trial… -
From Here to 'Afar': The Art of Peter Forgacs
“Once upon a time” is a phrase we use for fairy tales and fables. Yet most Jews carry with them another time, another land, another city. It could be the Pale of Settlement or Vilnius, Krakow or Lvov or, in more recent times, the Lower East Side, the Bronx, Tehran, Moscow, Buenos Aires or even the Tel Aviv that once was. Perhaps in the future we will say the same for Paris, Manchester or Copenhagen. Quien Sabe? That feeling of… -
Bob Dylan Blew My Mind at MusiCares
Let me indulge in some hyperbole: When Moses spoke after he came down from the mountain, when Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount, I don’t believe their audience could have been any more stunned than I or the other 3000 attendees were at Friday night’s Grammy week MusiCares charity event when Bob Dylan, this year’s person-of-the-year honoree, took to the podium and spoke for some 35 minutes, cogently, lyrically and, at moments, comically and poignantly. During Dylan’s speech the… -
Fifty Shades of Mel Brooks
Anastasia writes: I was a college student at the time working part-time at Fromin’s deli, the first time he came in. There was something powerful and domineering about him. “I need things,” he said to me, his voice a rough mix of Brooklyn and post-nasal drip that sent an electric current though my whole body. “What sort of things?” I said in all innocence. “Things. Bagels, cream cheese, lox. I need them. I want them.” No one had ever talked… -
Paula Bronstein and The Big Picture
How do we understand the impact of climate change and natural disasters on people and architecture, and how does humanity learn from our mistakes and try to prepare for potential future cataclysms? That is ostensibly the agenda of “Sink or Swim: Designing for a Sea Change,” an exhibition opening Dec. 13 at the Annenberg Space for Photography, curated by Frances Anderton, an architecture writer perhaps best-known as the host and executive producer of KCRW’s DnA Design and Architecture radio program.… -
Leonard Cohen's Triumphant "Problems"
The mere release of “Popular Problems,” two days after Leonard Cohen’s 80th birthday last month, is remarkable in and of itself. (How many 80-year-old sex symbols and style icons are there?) But it also caps a decade in which Cohen conquered troubling neuroses and fears to mount worldwide tours that were invocations, convocations and spiritual gatherings, not to mention money-makers, that returned Cohen, who’d been swindled out of his lifesavings, to financial security. His is one of the more amazing… -
In Re: Artist Miri Chais' Mind
“Re:Mind,” a multimedia installation at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art, is the first solo show in the United States for Miri Chais, an Israeli-born artist who now lives in Los Angeles. For the show, Chais created and installed a room full of paintings and sculptures, as well as objects that have screens embedded in them, all of it accompanied by music (much of it composed by her 15-year-old son) and a looped video displayed on the walls behind and surrounding…