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Spies, Celebs, Classics and More — Good Reads are Coming Up
Among the most daunting questions I’m often confronted with is: “What should I read next?†Recently, I traveled to the depths of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York for BookExpo 2009, the annual American Bookseller’s gathering, where I crisscrossed the convention floor, Indiana Jones-like, to gather publishers’ catalogues and advance-reader copies of so many books that when I headed back to Los Angeles, American Airlines threatened to make me check my so-called “carry-on luggage.†“These are books!  -
Design with a "Z" (Lajos Kozma and Szalon)
Lajos Kozma. Photo courtesy Szalon Can a piece of furniture convey the story of Hungarian Jewry or reveal the genius of a little-known master? The story of a career undercut by anti-Semitism and cut short by death? This weekend's "Legends of La Cienega Design Walk" (May 7-9) offers a celebration of design through lectures, panel discussions, book signings, exhibits, guided tours, fashion shows and benefit parties, all taking place along La Cienega Boulevard, on Melrose Place and at the Pacific… -
JEWBALL: From First NBA Basket to Major League Umping
Who knew? Who knew that basketball has a storied Jewish past, or that a non-sports guy like me would ever read, no less enjoy, a book about baseball umpires, Bruce Weber's "As They See 'Em" (Scribner, 2009)? Maybe it's because Passover is a time of miracles - or is that Chanukah? Or Purim? Or the entire sweep of Jewish history? No matter. We're here to talk sports, a subject I now know a little more about. Recently, as March Madness… -
City of Images
Los Angeles has long held a fascination with the visual; beholden to looks, surfaces and images, it is a city where even the buildings seem to strike a pose. So it might seem surprising that until now, there's never been an institution here devoted to photography. But that all changes this week with the opening of the stunning new Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City. Located on the site of the former Schubert Theater, in the shadow of the… -
Laud the Life of Sid Grauman, Hollywood's Gold Standard
Ever wonder how the movie industry went from five-cent nickelodeons in New York to the glamour of Hollywood with red carpet premieres and the highest of artistic aspirations? Or why a certain pagoda-like Hollywood movie theater in whose courtyard rest footprints of actors is one of the most beloved and frequented tourist sites on the planet? Look no further than the story of Sid Grauman, whose birth 130 years ago will be celebrated this Saturday, March 14, by the American… -
Zap! Pow! Bam!
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's two Jewish kids from Cleveland! The fact that Superman, the defender of truth, justice and the American way, as created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was not so much from Krypton as, in the words of cartoon artist Jules Feiffer, "from Planet Minsk," is one of the many things to be learned from "Zap! Pow! Bam! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950," which opened… -
Holocaust Movies: Winners & Losers
"The Reader" Are Holocaust movies good for the Jews? Or even, for that matter, for society at large? This year's offerings include "Defiance," a story of a group of Jews who were heroic resistance fighters; "The Reader," a story of post-war revelation about a Nazi woman who beds down with a German boy; "Good," about the moral compromises of a German university professor in the Nazi era; "Adam Resurrected," based on Yoram Kaniuk's novel about a demented Holocaust survivor living… -
Tom is.... (facebook and my generation)
Tommywood is ... Tom is ... on Facebook. Aren't you? If you read this column online and are not on Facebook, you will soon be. The Facebook wave has now washed over my generation, the "late baby boomers." In the last two months, the number of people in my crowd who have just joined or who joined a while ago but are now suddenly really using the social network is exploding exponentially. Why? Why now? And what, exactly, is it… -
"Breakdowns" & The "Maus" that roared (or Art Spiegelman through the looking glass)
Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist whose graphic memoir, "Maus," won a Pulitzer Prize, was in town recently to promote a reissue of "Breakdowns," a collection of his underground comics work first published in 1978. As Spiegelman pointed out to me, his name in German means "Mirror Man" (mine means "Pond-wood") -- and revisiting "Breakdowns," now subtitled, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!" was like finding a letter you'd written 30 years ago. For this new edition, Spiegelman spent two… -
The Grammy Museum: The Culture We Keep
The Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, the Venus de Milo, Van Gogh's "Starry Night," Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Pete Seeger's banjo, the handwritten lyrics to Grandmaster Flash's "The Message." You might wonder what all these cultural artifacts have in common. But as of Dec. 6, they can all be seen in museums -- the last two items just went on view at the new Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles. I place them together because they underline the question that… -
"Doc" The Life and Fictions of Harold Humes
Watching wasted genius, a life gone wrong, is compelling and poignant, but with "Doc" airing December 9, at 10PM on PBS' Independent Lens (Check your local listings for actual times), we feel much more like guests doing a post-mortem on a private party where the drinks may have been dosed. "Doc" is a documentary by Immy Humes about her father, the novelist and cultural figure, Harold L. "Doc" Humes, who was by many measures a success: he was a founder… -
Wild about Diamond
David Wild wants you to know that he is an unabashed Neil Diamond fan. So much so that he has written a book titled, "He Is ... I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond" (Da Capo Press) that is less biography, according to Wild, than "tribute album." Being a Diamond fan (dare we call him a Diamond head?) is as much a part of Wild as, well ... being Jewish. Wild grew up in Tenafly,…